Creation vs. Evolution

Apes and Fools

2012-01-23T03:22:00.000-08:00

Apes do not deny God, but neither do they believe in God.

Fools do not think they are mad, but neither do they think they are sane.

Even so some psychiatry personnel is quite capable of saying to judge of liberty (as they say in France) when a patient said she felt sane, that psychotic patients never think they are psychotic - and judge of liberty was so bad at logic, she fell for the trick.

Even so, someone is also able to write:

man descends from the ape, the proof: he believes in God

as if believing in God was some kind of apeish thing.

Sad when logic breaks down before rhetoric. Happened in an evolutionist progressive environment like Germany 1933 too.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris - La Clairière
23 - I - 2012

PS: I would not like to be the guy who wrote above inanity about apes and believing in God on a Church wall, even if he did it in French.

Funny How Some Systematically Answer the Wrong Questions

2012-01-21T11:32:00.000-08:00

I was right the other day verifying what kind of education high school students of France receive about evolution.

Yes, there is a part about genetics, no it does not cover chromosome changes except the sporadic ones we know do not tend to constitute new species, a k a trisomies, and whatever you call it when one pair has only one chromsome, and so on. Yes, the question of how chromosome numbers change may well come up, but probably it will be exactly where it is not problematical like chimp to human which would be a fusion leading to our chromosome 2, or polyploidy which is quite plausible in plants, but hardly in mammals. And of course they do take up genetic drift, which is not about the number of chromosomes but about their

The real problem about chromosome number changes is about increasing chromosome numbers in mammals.

http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html

The real problem between chimp and human or between common ancestor of both and human is that we have reason. As I said on a side issue on a debate with a heliocentric, reason is not a brain function per se. Even if some connected things are.

http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2011/01/qph.html
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2011/01/orchor-what-is-that.html

Instead of adressing the real problems, like reason differring between human and supposed relatives, or chromosome numbers with increase problems in mammals, they adress above named sham issues.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI Georges Pompidou
21 January, St Agnes and
Venerable King Louis XVI
Y o o L 2012

Letter to Nature on Karyotype Evolution in Mammals

2011-11-07T12:11:00.001-08:00

I thought I had very clearly proven evolution impossible or so highly improbable as to be less credible than creation, except to atheist prejudice, here are my articles:

http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2009/08/karyogrammata.html
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-had-dream-one-night.html
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/06/another-possibility.html

However, first one of these - a composite one - quotes to refute a post by P Z Myers, and I found at last that I should comment on it, this short link gives you comment #210, my first in this series: http://o-x.fr/30jp - and there I found such a support of chromosome splits occurring and being viable, that I thought you guys might like to offer up that link so the thread of discussion can be peer reviewed by you!

Have they found people who have actually one chromosome pair more by split chromosome in common ancestor, cousin marriage and the split chromosome of each parent being transmitted to child?

As far as I understood the link about 1982 publication by Janke D., entitled "Centric fission of chromosome nr. 7 in three generations", it is in each generation only one of the pair 7, but the link gives no actual text or summary, only the bare reference, and I have not checked it:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7076262

So, have I still a chance of having disproven possibility of mammals having common ancestor (alternatively of evolution being sth that can be proven, see my third essay), should I have counted on first mammal being tetraploid 4n=96 and simplifying to diploid (2n=48) in some cases (that might give less immunity reaction than other way round, where polyploidy is a cause of spontaneous abortion) and in others diversifying each pair to two different ones (2n=96)? But if so, why are there mammals with more than 48 chromosomes in diverse genera, like both primates (lemurians) and whatever is the genus of rhinoceros? Again, a scenario in which parallel developments would be occurring after species or even genus diversification, thereby invalidating the assumption "common trait implies common ancestor".

Do publish, I am afraid of leaving their arguments about chromosome splits without peer reviews! At least in the form of debate.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris/France
7-11-2011

Planetary Evolution. Supposed such.

2011-09-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

Latest news from the hobby philosophers who think they reason better than the rest of us because they own the telescopes, a k a astronomers, is that Jupiter once was as close to the Sun as Mars or Asteroid belt is now, and Saturn was just behind. That squeezed the small planets together, explaining why Mars got smaller than Earth. When Jupiter withdrew, and Saturn too, the orbits of telluric planets widened and got elliptic. That explains five out of six mysteries, the one left is how Jupiter and Saturn themselves formed.

Whoppee!

Even with for each an orbit of completely stable form, it is a bit belief staggering that planets keep in orbits merely for the balance between solar gravitation and their own previous speed, circle after circle, ellipse after ellipse. No God to keep them there, no angels to run them as men run bicycles, only two forces, mainly, and still the orbit works after billions of turn.

But with orbits changing positions due to other orbits being closer or further ... well, I think there might be something fishy with the reasoning of the scientists. Not necessarily the calculations, but the thinking before you set out to check with calculations, and the thinking of how facts are translated into maths.

The few weeks (back in last millennium) that I did teach mathematics, one guy who had one problem had it not because of any fault in his additions, subtractions, multiplications or divisions, but because he was wrong in a very elementary way of what was to be calculated (it was a realistic, thus fact related, math problem).

In less elementary ways (maybe) this could also be the case with scientists. When it comes to those thinking dating methods are proofs against a young earth, it is the case even in a very elementary way.

This news about "how solar system formed (without a creator)" makes the theories about it being very old and established by brute forces without any creator less worth believing than before, to my mind.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Beauvais
25-IX-2011

vs Evolution or vs Traducion?

2011-09-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

One can actually be a creationist in two senses.

If you believe not only that God created Heaven and Earth, but also each species on earth without needing or otherwise using evolution to make the big differences like between a cat and a dog or a man and a monkey (possibly not yet between horse and donkey or dog and wolf, but I am not sure), you are a Creationist as opposed to an Evolutionist.

If however you believe that unlike each body, conceived from a part of the father's and a part of the mother's seminal cells in the seminal fluids, each soul is created originally and directly by God, you are a creationist. If you believe that each human souls excepting Adam's and possibly Eve's comes from a soul aspect or soul part in one's parents, then you are a Traducianist.

From Latin verb tra-ducere, lead over, lead across.

I am of course a Creationist in both senses. And I believe atheist Evolutionism with materialism to be the ultimate parodic form of Traducianism. If the mind is only an aspect of biology, obviously its qualities would be inherited with other such through the DNA and RNA.

Also, Traducianism in both Christian (mainly Protestant) and Atheist forms tends to overdo the capacity of parents to empathise with children or even their rights over children irrespective of empathy, meaning Traducianism is less likely than Creationism (in this sense) to leave children sufficiently free.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Beauvais
25-IX-2011

"If men evolved from apes, why are there still apes" ...

2011-08-28T08:11:00.000-07:00

I like to argue correctly even against evolution, and therefore do not use that argument.

It is also known as "if land animals evolved from Coelocanths, why are there still Coelocanths"?

Evolution as understood by Darwinists does not mean every example of unevolved species as is must everywhere be extinct as ousted by more developed form. It means they were ousted by more developed form in one particular place. So even if every Coelocanth in one particular place - they have also been called Crossopterygians - was ousted by coelocanths with firmer fins or more lunglike gills, and that evolved form is ancestor of land animals, it does not mean coelocanths were ousted by them all through the seven seas - for obviously not every population of coelocanths had one strain that mutated on way to land animals. Even if more than one had, it does not mean for land animals to exist on evolutionary basis they had to oust the more classical coelocanths in every one of the populations. One population where they did suffices for Darwinism to be plausible on this account.

Likewise even if in one place every ramapithecus of original setup was ousted by a ramapithecus slightly closer to australopithecus, it does not mean there were not other places where they were not ousted by ramapithecuses closer to gorillas rather than to australopithecuses.

That part of mechanism of evolution is not the problem.

Nor is it a problem that Crossopterygians were thought extinct but found out as surviving in Coelocanths. Tarzan lives in a fictional place close to Opar were dinosaurs were never extinct, and he lives in as Darwinian a universe as Sherlock Holmes (not meaning Sherlock's method of deduction is Darwinian, but Arthur Conan Doyle actually made each crime an illustration of some aspect of Darwinism).

All this would have been quite acceptable, scientifically speaking, if we had not known about chromosomes. They are what makes evolution, specifically of mammals from one common ancestor into every different species, impossible. Here is what I previously wrote about it:

Karyogrammata
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2009/08/karyogrammata.html
I had a dream one night
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-had-dream-one-night.html

Even this is not the cardinal difficulty against our presumed descent from Ramapithecus - presumed by Darwinists. Other supposed descendants of Ramapithecus, Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Orang Utangs, all have 48 chromosomes, which might be the original count of mammals, if they had one common ancestor. And man has 46, and gowing down is not the major difficulty.

But for man to descend from Ramapithecus with Chimpanzees, either man's reason and language would have to be products of evolution, or Chimpanzees' lack of them - smartness but no reason, gestures of emotion but no words of discourse - as a deterioration of evolutionary origin.

Derek Bickerton in Adam's Language openly teaches that language is a product of evolution and reason a by-product of language. He is wrong - but the argument is not about extinct or non-extinct ancestor species, nor about chromosome numbers: between apes and us it is about reason not being reducible to an epiphenomenon of language.

Because, when Bickerton calls language and reason products of evolution, he starts out calling them illusory products of synapses. But our experience cannot be an illusion, it must be real, even if our experience of this or that exterior thing is an illusory experience as regards the real thing. Bickerton starts out presuming sun moving in the sky and earth resting below our feet are illusory experiences of earth turning with us and sun resting where it is. Even if he were right - I think he is very wrong even there - it does not prove mind is in an illusion about itself. If synapses were all that were real about our minds, before "what observer" or before "what observing entity in observer" would thought and language - and argument! - be an illusory version of them? Before synapses themselves? But presumably they do not set out to observe.

There is a consciousness that thinks.
There are synapses that do not think.
If thought occurs, it is not because of synapses.
If consciousness occurs, it is not because of synapses.
If thought and consciousness are illusions - that illusion cannot be due to mere synapses, but only due to the supposedly illusory consciousness.
Ergo, consciousness is a primary reality, and it is not due to synapses.

That is the good argument against the evolutionary view of man.

As to whether frogs descend from coelocanths, it is less important. Obviously they do not, since each parent couple produces offspring after its kind, in its image, and frogs are not the image of coelocanths. But even if they could have been, that would not have left man with his consciousness and reason as evolved from beasts without reason and matter without consciousness. Nor would the mammals with more than 48 chromosomes - some of which are in the supposed line of our evolutionary descent, like lemurs - be explicably caused by sexual and gestational generation as known.

Nor is there any proof of there having been enough time for coelocanths to evolve into frogs and salamanders, and reptiles - preturtles, prebirds, premammals - to evolve from them, and later mammals from premammals, lemurs from early mammals, monkeys from lemurs, apes from monkeys, starting with Ramapithecus, Australopithecus with Lucy from Rampithecus, and so on:

Why so shy about creationist pov on C14?
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/07/why-so-shy-about-creationist-pov-on-c14.html

It is even not probably in an atheistic universe, since it is not probable that earth is kept orbitation after orbitation in same orbit by a balance of two powers neither of which dominates into flying off at tangent or falling down into sun. Stone on string is a very clear non-parallel, since string is not a mere equal power in other direction to centrifugal force, but a superior solidity posing an outer limit to the orbitations*. Even Newton and Napoleon, though accepting mere gravitation and inertia as usual current causations of any planetary orbit, at least could not find it probable that this continued to work even the 6000 years - thus orbitations - of history they accorded earth without any setting right of out-orbit or in-orbit deviations of movement made by God or his angels. An atheist who accepts Newtonian Heliocentrism but denies superior powers to put orbits right and assumes orbit has been used for 400+ millions of orbitations does show a certain inferiority to their power of imagination and logical grasp of probabilities.

Arguing against evolution is good. Arguing against evolution with bad arguments is not good. It exposes arguer and all his side to ridicule from those who know the answers and on top of that accustoms arguer and his side to bad logic - or at best bad fact checking. And bad logic cannot be counted on as serving truth tomorrow, just because it serves truth - in a bad way - today. Bad logic ensues when following the logic of the ones arguing for falsehood to closely - to closely in answering it, not in apprehending it - and by being too opportunistic about finding an answer that respects as much as possible of the beliefs of an atheistic, mind-is-brain-synapses, heliocentric, Darwinian.

Step out of their philosophic rigmarole, use all of their facts, but none of their prejudices or bad guesses, when arguing. And of course not what you merely presume to be their method, even if it is not, like saying or arguing as if Darwinians meant that species from which another evolves must be extinct by the time the new one is there.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou of
Beaubourg, Paris
Sunday 28-VIII-2011

*Orbitation may be my coinage, I mean cycles around an orbit.

Why so shy about creationist pov on C14?

2011-07-07T01:50:00.000-07:00

Religious Tolerance is a site supporting deism.

Here is their take on why creationists reject Carbon 14 dating:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/c14datc.htm

ChristianAnswers.net states: "Outside the range of recorded history, calibration of the 14C clock is not possible."

This was true back in the 1950s. A team of researchers, headed by Willard F. Libby calibrated the C-14 measuring technique by comparing the measured age of samples from ancient Egypt with their known date. For example, they tested a piece of wood from Pharaoh Zoser's tomb with the known tomb date, which was known to be circa 2700 to 2600 BCE. The agreement was excellent. Since then, extended calibration checks have been made using U.S. bristlecone pine, German and Irish oak, and other species of trees. That work pushed the calibration back well beyond recorded history to 10,000 BP (years before the present.) Other correlations have extended that to 26,000 years BP. It may eventually go back as far as 45,000 years, which is the approximate limit of the C-14 technique. 6

Right.

Not really. And this is a key issue according to the site:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_disp.htm

The foundational observations which support evolution are the ordered fossil record and radiometric analysis of the dates of rocks.
If the radiometric analysis of the age of rocks is valid, then two main beliefs of young-earth creation scientists are disproved.
The rock layers were deposited over billions of years, not during the 150 days of Noah's flood.
That the earth is on the order of 4.6 billion years old, not many thousands of years old.

Still, if some convincing proof were discovered that the radiometric analyses are in error by about a factor of 500,000 or so, and that the earth is fewer than 10,000 years of age, then evolution would be disproved. There simply would not have been sufficient time for all of the new species to have evolved. Six specialists in geology, geochemistry and physics have formed the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) research group. They have been working since 1997 to disprove radiometric dating, to prove that the earth is young, and thereby disprove evolution. 8

The site fails to mention a pretty standard creationist point of view in more words than the forequoted: "Outside the range of recorded history, calibration of the ¹⁴C clock is not possible" - from Christian Answers.

C14 is not an invariant per se in the athmosphere, it is more or less invariant - some variations are recorded - due to two opposing dynamics:

cosmic rays build up C14, exposure times exposable original isotope
radioactive decay tears down C14 to non-radioactive isotope, in a ratio to what amount of C14 there is already.

This means when there is little or none C14, the build up exceeds the tear down. This means that a young earth scenario implies the possibility of C14 not yet fully built up to equilibrial level, either even now or at least recently.

Now, that, in turn, does imply if not proof of fact as such at least a very clear possibility of datings being wrong at very high ratios. Not so much the C14 datings - we will return to other ones - but even those can be wrong by high ratios. A sample without any C14 - is it from 45.000 before present or older or from the day after Adam tasted the apple, the first plant or beast that died as a consequence of human sin, at a time when there was no C14?

The dating would be wrong, not due to any miscalculation on part of scientists, but due to misapplication of calculations, according to false presuppositions. For other dating methods, other presuppositions would be the wrong ones. But evolutionists would - for the very reason stated in second quote from Religious Tolerance site - tend to make precisely the assumptions that would give too high ages, not the ones that would give too low ones.

Thorium-Lead and Uranium-Lead methods repose not only on an assumption of very much slower radioactive decay (we know that Uranium at least sometimes decays very fast in nuclear chain reactions) but also the assumption that the lead isotopes associated with samples conatining either Uranium or Thorium (to be fair, they are two different isotopes!) all come from decay of Uranium and Thorium.

As for dendrochronology - important because Religious Tolerance site stated it has pushed calibration of C14 beyond 10.000 before present - the main reaction is: "we buy the dendrochronology of the living trees, but there have in taking the chain through dead ones been mismatches, there have been matchings were matches were not taken for best matches but for oldest datings". Basically, about the accuracy there is word against word, and we laymen cannot verify, because we have often not the time, and certainly nearly never the skill for testing match after match between sample pair after sample pair. Assuming one would get the access. And assuming variations in tree rings are globally consistent.

Now that is a point of view pretty common among young earth creationists. And it is not stated in so many words but instead the site choses the shortest possible quote and refutes it without bothering that the other side has already refuted their refutation. I will now highlight a part of the second quote:

Six specialists in geology, geochemistry and physics have formed the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) research group. They have been working since 1997 to disprove radiometric dating, to prove that the earth is young, and thereby disprove evolution.

So datings can either be proven right or proven wrong, but not simply argued to be not proven? Now that is a show of fairness and open mind, along with a real close mindedness. The possibility of datings being argued not proven is the classical young earth creationist take, and it was well known before 1997. If you do not know that, the RATE group seems to prove conventional science takes creationism seriously with an open mind. If you do know this, it staggers belief they left out from the mission statement "or argue that old datings are not proven, on the lines already suggested by creationists" or words to same effect.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BU de Beauvais
7-VII-2011

Did Noah suffer like Winston - undefeated?

2011-06-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

[11] And the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with iniquity. [12] And when God had seen that the earth was corrupted (for all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth,) [13] He said to Noe: The end of all flesh is come before me, the earth is filled with iniquity through them, and I will destroy them with the earth.

Genesis, chapter 6, from Douay-Rheims Bible Online.

'It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.'
'Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we chose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we chose to quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Party is immortal. ... We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. ...'

Nineteen Eighty-Four, pp. 281 f. with omissions marked ...

George Orwell is describing a terrorising intimidator called O'Brien describing to his victim Winston the kind of totalitarian rule he proposes to make his victim accept by total fear and total surrender.

People have faced such things in Roumania, I fear in Dachau too. And a young boy called Josef Wajsblat was in a gaz chamber, but saved in the last moment by irrational anger from none other than Doctor Mengele - a fine "room 101", if you like.

The ideology of O'Brien comes out as something which is very close to what may have been what happened before the flood. "All flesh had corrupted its way" - teen girls too? Babies too? Does it say they were evil and mean in their hearts? No, it says their flesh was corrupted.

Modern education and societies in practise force girls to:

wait marrying till 18 (legal) or, further up you get in society more like 30 it gets (social pressure),
attend schools with coeducation (legal many countries) till age 16 (legal) and where flirting is considered ok years before any kind of marriage (social pressure),
where not only malthusian perversions and artificial means of achieving same result, but also abortion is taught as solutions respectively all right and in worst case possible (legal induction of social pressure)
and there is an acceptation of hypnosis (social pressure)
and a frowning on daily prayer and weekly fasting (social pressure, in some countries legal powers of persecution)
- and after that you hope they stay chaste till marriage?

The ideology of O'Brien involves society evolving into a hive. I have already written about that in Beware of Meta Man. No, the title was even braver than I remembered: Resist Meta Man.

http://hglundahl.blogspot.com/2006/08/resist-meta-man-evolutionary.html

It is exactly what Chesterton feared Evolution leads to. There are even Catholic versions of it, like the Piltdown probable forger Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit Father of a sort. He dreamed of a noosphere. I have seen tendencies of moral evolutionism even in St Nicolas du Chardonnet, and also in Orthodox Church. A willingness to make a newcomer suffer and surrender. A willingness even to paint God in colours that remind me of O'Brien.

It is not God who forces pregnant thirteen year olds to either abort or adopt but never even dream of simply starting a family. It is Newthink.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou library of
Paris
16 - VI - 2011

PS, George Orwell made some funny allusions: O'Brien reminds me of Brian Borumha, the royal "Winston" who, like King Alfred did resist Vikings (you are more tired of victory than we are of defeat), the year 1984 is set as in Napoleon of Notting Hill where human nature does turn against totalitarianism, there is a Syme as in The Man Who was Thursday ... but here he is just a man concerned with dictionary writing (God made Tolkien a revenge for that slur on dictionary writers: a man who may yet prove more of a Gabriel Syme than a Dr Johnson drinking the usurper's health), and of course, in the pages quoted and their surroundings, Geocentric and Young Earth scenarios are set off as illogically as "2+2=5" because atheistically: in such a case it really is a kind of collective solipsism as O'Brien himself puts it. Geocentrism without Primum Movens to move outermost sphere and angels for the planets, Young Earth without Creation are obviously illogical. Kind of the funniest allusion, or most tragic, because it means the writer saw the judges of Galileo as O'Briens rather than as the courteous and logical St Robert Bellarmine in first process, the pious Urban VIII in the second./HGL

PPS, As a Geocentric I take offense at any comparison with O'Brien. I have given a method where distance or closeness of stars (which has nothing to do with navigation, practically) could be determined by watching parallax from Mars:

http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2011/04/cagasuamfobdis.html

Those who refuse that experiment are - heliocentrics, partly./HGL

Another possibility

2011-06-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

A typical karyogram of a mammal is 2n=48.

A deviant form of karyogram will cause spontaneous abortion. At least I have verified this for humans. Trisomy can occur in chromosome pair 21, giving Downs syndrom, but trisomy in a really big chromosome like pair 1 or 3 gives spontaneous abortion. Except when it does not occur in every cell of foetus.

So what about higher karyograms, like 70 - 80 chromosomes or so, developing before this immunity reaction against deviant karyograms developed, and then after that the development of the immunity reaction?

Well, in that case the development of the immunity reaction would have happened independently in all different strands of mammals with higher, lower or same chromosome numbers. In that case, evolution might remain possible, but as with the missing link, less evidenced. Or, not evidenced at all.

This argument boils down to evolution being possible to have happened if it becomes impossible to prove: for one classic argument in favour of evolution is precisely that if two beings share the same trait, it must have developed at the latest in last common ancestor.

Here we have a deadlock for evolutionists. If immunity against deviant karyograms developed first, no chromosome numbers above that of 48 are possible. Which we know to be untrue about mammals. If karyograms above 48 developed first, and evolution somehow happened, that immunity came to develop after separation of different species, i e independently.

And if the same trait can develop without presence in last common ancestor, then community of traits is so very clearly not a proof for any common ancestor. And even if evolution were true, it would not be philosophically proven.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Boulogne-Billancourt
15 - VI - 2011

"Back when Genesis was written people could not understand concepts like millions of years" ...

2011-05-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

Factoid.

A Christian believing Biblical story and Chronology and an Evolutionist whether Christian or not will have diverse opinions about what was too complex for people enumerated in genealogies before Noah or even whether they existed or not.

But not even evolutionists need suppose that Genesis comes from an age when man had no mental capacity for understanding a concept like "millions of years". Biblical Hebrew and its Greek translation does have expressions meaning millions. Like in Daniel ch. 7 verse 10:

A swift stream of fire issued forth from before him: thousands of thousands ministered to him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before him: the judgment sat, and the books were opened.

Thousands of thousands = millions.
Ten thousand times a hundred thousand = 1000.000.000

Vedas and Mahabharata and Upanishads are pretty old literature too. Unlike Hebrew literature not in having the concept but in applying it to years. I am not sure which one of them - maybe more than just one - states this thing about Himalayas very slowly wearing down until the world is destroyed and recreated, but that too is very clearly pre-modern writing and shows pre-modern civilisations contained men capable of grasping the concept in question.

Silmarillion, though never meant to be factually believed, also states age of earth as very old, far far older than Genesis says. And the statements have nothing like modern scientist or rationalist sound, but clearly expresses the concept in a clearly pre-modern way. Which is enough of an answer to a statement like in the title.

In a Christian Evolutionist the statement is only erroneous. He may believe Genesis simplifies the view point of the Omniscient God to adapt to people who could not grasp a concept like "millions". This is not good theology, as it makes God a kind of wellmeaning liar. But at least it is comprehensible how they reason.

An Evolutionist who was an Atheist could not say such a thing. He would have to argue Hebrews shortened genealogies before they began writing or took them up again after a long break and then their mistake was sacralised by coming to be included in a sacred book. A position which is of course not at all acceptable to a Christian.

Since in last two essays I have stated I know about but do not believe Silmarillion, I do foresee one standard question from some atheist readers. How do I know the Gospels, let alone Genesis is not fiction like Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings? The short answer is: peoples (Hebrews and Christians) have accepted them as their earliest records. None has made such a mistake about Silmarillion. A more detailed answer is not given on this blog, since it is dedicated to the special debate between Genesis and Darwin believers, with author on the Genesis side, but on another of my blogs:

somewhere else

Enjoy the reading!

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Versailles
19-V-2011

Another funny thing about mammal evolution as supposed ...

2011-05-06T04:38:00.000-07:00

I am just watching a diagram in a book about language origin:

Aux Origines des langues
et du langage
Sous la direction de
Jean-Marie Hombert

On p. 52 we are dealing with an essay by Philippe Vernier, and he gives a phylogenetic tree of vertabrates. In fact two, the right one being a detailed tree of mammals, I transmit only the lest tree in a table, and I translate names as best I can (with a little help from wiki).

MYBP+/-*	(origin)**	first group	second group
placed as if date of split, actually date of appearance of origin, *abbreviated if identic to second group of previous split
540	craniata	vertebrates with/	vertebrates without jaws
?	vertebrates without jaws	hagfish	lampreys
470	vertebrates with jaws	cartilaginous fishes	bone verterates
410	b. vert.	ray-finned fishes	tetrapodes
370	tetr.	amphibians	amniotes
340	amn.	mammalia	sauropsides
320	saur.	turtles	diapsides
300	diaps.	serpents, lizards	birds, crocodiles

Two funny things about this. One is: nearly every time, except for hagfish and lampreys and also except for serpent/lizard vs. bird/crocodile groups, where both emerging groups are identifiable specific types of genera, and except for first split were neither is, one is pretty particular, the other very general.

What I learned was that there were never any tetrapodes that were neither amphibians nor amniotes, but amphibians were simply the first amniotes. Never any bone vertebrates that were neither rayfinned fishes nor tetrapodes, but tetrapodes developed from rayfinned fishes. Never any amniotes that were neither ... wait a minute!

Here is the second funny thing: amniotes lead to either mammals or sauropsides. Ouch! Mammalians branching off as early as 340 million years before present! I had learned the mammals began their carreer after the demise of dinosaurs.

OK, some fossiles and datings in the eighties.

The branch-offs from amniotes which supposedly developed from amphibians are then, according to evolutionists, Anapsides, Synapsides, Diapsides, according to skull anatomy. Anapsides are supposed to have left us one branch, turtles, Synapsides also one branch, mammals, and Diapsides birds and non-turtle reptiles. Figures.

Early ~~mammals~~ sorry synapsides are supposed to include Dimetrodon, which counts as a Dinosaur. Sorry: Pelycosaur. Apart from Pelycosaurs there were other pre-mammalian synapsides, like therapsides, later developing into mammals. All according to recent "science".

Oh, and Reptiles is no longer a phylum. Synapsides, Anapsides and Diapsides are phyla, of which all Anapsides along with extinct Synapsides (non-extinct being non-reptilian mammals) and some but not all Diapsides count as "reptiles" which thus is a paraphylum.

Impressed?

In a way yes. Just as I am impressed by Tolkien's Silmarillion. Æsthetically and intellectually for the thought put into either of them.

Convinced?

No. Not by evolution, nor by Silmarillion. I did get curious about some ideas expressed in Silmarillion, found the spiritual as opposed to merely physical moving factors of sun and moon expressed in clear, Christian erudite non-fiction, totally predating Tolkien. And am thus a Geocentric. But I am not an evolutionist. As little as I am a silmarillionist.

There is of course ideas which I find true even in evolutionary thought: like the very probable fact that Dimetrodon existed and was according to scull anatomy a synapside. This does not prove it was ancestor of extant mammals. And since all non-soft parts are long since away, I cannot even be sure it was not a mammal, though some traits (leg anatomy) have been found or reconstructed as "reptilian". What we do not know either is when it lived. Dating methods are intellectually a hotch-potch of assumptions without proof. Make similar assumptions about diverse methods and they will tend to confirm each other, especially if you calibrate them (i e readjust datings) on each other, which I know is done between dendrochronology and Carbon 14.

English readers have easy access to Creationist sites criticising dating methods, for French readers there is at least my summary - making Carbon 14 an epitome of dating methods, well aware it is not the only one - in my essay here:

Atapuerca: 80.000 (ou encore 800.000) ans de vieux?

But, believing details found in Silmarillion because I find them confirmed by earlier Christian erudition and simple good sense does not make me a silmarillionist believer and believing details like existence of Dimetrodon does not make me a Darwinist.

My best criticism of Darwinism is not about its lack of proof, but about proof to the contrary. It is in effect as soon as there are mammals reproducing with amniotic sack joined to body of mother rather than in a shell and thus subject to immunity system of its mother. It has to do with chromosome numbers, centromeres, telomeres, geometry. In that order. All of which are real scientific data, verifiable every day in laboratories and microscopes. My essays about it are here:

Karyogrammata
I had a dream one night.
Citing, again, Ian Johnston.

So, enjoy the reading folks!

I suppose the reason French are so often attached to Evolution in general is not that they understand and believe heredity as known by Mendel and Chromosomes, but that they are very often Lamarckian while confessing to be Darwinist.

Meanwhile, making Silmarillion and Evolution parallels in this essay (which is not strictly science all way through, but a review on science) has a point: Tolkien did mean Silmarillion as a theory, though not a very realistic one, about background and beginnings of human history with explanation specifically of European mythology (Túrin story compares to Finnish Kullervo story and less in detail but more in seriousness to Greek Oedipous story) and some European but not Indoeuropean vocabulary (Quenya "ranka"="hand and arm", cf Lithuanian and Russian, Sindarin "alf"="swan", cf Icelandic "álft"). And he did modify it as new data or new light on old data came to hand. Precisely as scientists did modify the theory of how mammals evolved between back in my childhood when I learned about evolution and present when I read up on it again. That plus a wealth of detail, is not sufficient to prove either theory true or factual.

Oh, to get back to starting point: even if Silmarillion as a theory is not meant to be perfectly realistic, Tolkien did it for fun and aesthetic pleasure, when it comes to explaining why humans have speech, it clearly is less absurd than evolution. So, of course, is Genesis.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Versailles
19-V-2011

Iran heads last weeks readers here too:

2011-04-06T03:44:00.001-07:00

Iran 13

Wonder why?

For other questions related to atheism - a new blog

2011-03-18T10:14:00.000-07:00

somewhere else

To a man who called me "brother" today (and who reads this blog)

2011-03-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

I leave to God whether we are brothers, both in the true Church or not.

When I was Roumanian Orthodox, I did not abjure Roman Catholicism, though I did not believe Papacy. When I went back to Roman Catholicism, I broke no oath. When Benedict XVI ended the supposed excommunication sentence of 1988, that gave me back some confidence Papacy or Tradition where the Popes are was not lost.

I say this to be neither before men, nor before God a liar, nor to be judged by your bishop, whoever he be, as such.

I still think, when we talk of bishops, that the Roumanian one fell short of truth in such a solemn moment as an Easter Pastoral back in 2008. Sin is sin. Temptation is temptation. Error is error. Madness is madness and idiocy is idiocy. Mixing the former three with the latter into a broad category like "sicknesses of the soul" which resembles too much the modern term "mental illness" did scandalise me then, and remains objectionable now.

But brothers or not, I bear you no grudge in your person. Being funny - unless at same time hurting me - and being charitable in a funny way does end grudges where I am concerned. Usually that is. Unless there is an arrière-pensée on your part.

St Thomas Aquinas, St Robert Bellarmine, pray for me, that I loose not my uprightness and Christian freedom to Orientals quicker to anger and error than to charity!

As for you, keep praying and fasting as well as you can, and if God gives you confidence in Papacy, so much the better.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Georges Pompidou
11-III-2011

PS: "brother" I hope to be taken in a general Christian sense. I am opposed to free masons and all their lodges, from Grand Orient to P2, and - despite what seem to me to be rumours to the contrary - I am most certainly not a monk.

Agassiz vs Gray

2011-02-24T10:32:00.001-08:00

Louis Agassiz was a zoologist. Asa Gray was a botanist. They were Harvard professors in Darwin's day.

As I have already noted speciation by polyploidy is no problem for plants. Even in animals, variation within chromosomes keeping their number is no problem, but mammalian as well as plant species have differring chromosome numbers. And though slightly decreasing ones might just be feasible, increasing ones is a major problem if not an outright impossibility. I do not reckon there is a real feasible possibility for it. This message as well as this one deal with it.

You have guessed it, Louis Agassiz being a zoologist was anti-Darwin, his arguments are reused by Creationists to this day. Asa Gray, being a botanist was pro-Darwin.

Subsequent major Darwinists in the following decades were more Lamarckist than purely Darwinist not to mention Darwinist Mendelian. They did not come up as much with good explanations, as with mere discoveries -- I think the Dinosaurs were dealt with back then. Though their discoveries bolstered an impression of "once the fauna was different, so probably fauna, including its details the species has evolved", in explanatory and theoretical terms, they did not dare be fully Darwinist. Leaning too much on environment natural selection and adaption edge of the pair natural selection vs variation as they did is in reality saying, as Lamarck did, that adaptions made with a goal during an animals lifetime can be genetically transmitted. Which is an explanation that heredity has blown to pieces.

HGL

What about Dinosaurs?

2011-02-22T05:23:00.000-08:00

My main theory about Tyrannosaurs Rex is that it was a mutation or genetical engineering product with far greater size than the ordinary samples of that species. A bit like this:

Papa Smurf tries to create a new fertilizer, but it transforms an ordinary flower into a smurfivore plant. After destroying the plant, two smurfs try to get rid of the fertilizer throwing it in a lonely place. However, a bird swallows it and becomes a huge, destructive monster named the "Howlibird". The Howlibird destroys the smurf village and the smurfs escape to an old tower.

quoted from wiki article

A few weeks or months ago, China had found fossiles of a species like T Rex, but one hundred times smaller. Here. What if T Rex is to this as the Howlibird? I mean, "More than 30 specimens of Tyrannosaurus rex have been identified, some of which are nearly complete skeletons." "More than 30"="less than 40" in language, though that is not quite so in Mathematics. "All three of these latter specimens are smaller than the first.". Nanotyrannus are by some counted as juvenile exemplars (two of them, first only one skull) of T Rex. What if they are right about species being same, but wrong about which is both normal and adult? Teratophoneus ... is known from an incomplete skull and postcranial skeleton recovered from the Kaiparowits Formation. "Alioramus is known from the holotypes of A. remotus and A. altai." A fuller quote from Daspletosaurus is in order:

The type specimen of Daspletosaurus torosus (CMN 8506) is a partial skeleton including the skull, the shoulder, a forelimb, the pelvis, a femur and all of the vertebrae from the neck, torso and hip, as well as the first eleven tail vertebrae. ... Aside from the type, there is only one other well-known specimen, a complete skeleton discovered in 2001. ... The Oldman Formation was deposited during the middle Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, from about 77 to 76 Ma (million years ago).

I quote the last bit, because I think it worth while to note that, as any other young earth creationist would say, I believe there is this Oldman Formation, I am more than doutful about "Campanian stage of Late Cretaceous", and in the 77 to 76 million years ago, I have no faith at all. The no longer living animal itself, of course, is dated from the rock it is found in and thus from this estimate about 77 to 76 million years ago.

Another problem: Spinosaurus:

On the basis of a photograph of the lower jaw and a photograph of the entire specimen as mounted, Smith concluded that Stromer's original 1915 drawings were slightly inaccurate. In 2003, Oliver Rauhut suggested that Stromer's Spinosaurus holotype was a chimera, composed of vertebrae and neural spines from a carcharodontosaurid similar to Acrocanthosaurus and a dentary from Baryonyx or Suchomimus.:35−36 This analysis was rejected in at least one subsequent paper.

All other specimens are partial only. One from leg, some from snout or teeth. I suspect that the rejection of the chimera theory in that subsequent paper was necessary to keep up Paleontology as an Academic and supposedly scientific theory.

I have already touched upon this problem earlier on.

As for this:
link, not image upload - am not into the share alike since my conditions are here - by Franko Fonseca, it seems the teeth are teeth, but I am not as sure the bone is bone.

You see, there are fossils and fossils. Petrified skeletons are one type. Oops. Petrification is not the only kind of fossilisation. There is also Permineralisation:

Permineralized fossils preserve original cell structure, which can help scientists study an organism at the cellular level. These are three-dimensional fossils, which create permanent molds of internal structures. The mineralization process itself helps prevent tissue compaction, which distorts the actual size of organs. A permineralized fossil will also reveal much about the environment an organism lived in and the substances found in it since it preserves soft body parts. This helps researchers investigate the plants, animals, and microbes of different time periods. Examples of permineralization (:) Most dinosaur bones are permineralized. (...)

OK. Seems it might not be an artefact after all then. At least not a human one. Which of course is no guarantee the beast itself was wholly natural in origin.

If modern day weapon developers are going to try to take a cue from what might be the work of pre-flood genetical scientists, let us study the art of dragon-killing, in such literature as we have, it might turn out useful.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris V, Buffon
(appropriately enough!)
22-II-2011

Martin Amis is bad even as evolutionists go.

2011-01-18T05:23:00.000-08:00

Here is what he says.

Now, if evolution of society, more precisely medicine, has posed a "problem" like men living "too long", obviously evolution of diseases - resistent bacteria and global pandemies - might be more than he wishes for to deal with the "problem". And dealing with it in other ways - his ways: euthanasia, abortion, contraception, gay liberal agenda - will not help avoiding that klind of thing.

I wonder if people reasoned like that before the Flood of Noah*. After it, God shortened the lifespan of man, and to judge from when Set got his son, and so forth up to Noah, God also hurried puberty. Medicine will not enable us to live as long as Methusalem, and so neither saying puberty comes too soon or saying death comes too late will do any kind of "good" to society. Any kind that is, that God could agree with. It seems what God did was a grim poetic irony on what people weresaying before the Flood. And what Martin Amis seems set on repeating.

OK: the rainbow means there will not be another flood. But provocations like that to the author life ... well, reread Apocalypse* or some prophecy about the Great Chastisement, will you!

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Buffon, Paris V
18-I-2011

*I fear when these kind of naturalists read some supranatural disaster stories, it is more like Babylonic mis-representation of why flood happened (these idolaters thought one of their gods could not stand the hubbub of men, and caused disaster by going mad: God preserve us from idolaters acting like those gods!)

o-x.fr is back

2010-12-29T01:43:00.000-08:00

this is about previous post
it was temporarily down, but yesterday it was back again (maybe a day before that, but I did not look)

Was a French URL shortener blocked or destroyed because of linking here?

2010-12-22T01:53:00.000-08:00

a) there used to be an url shortener called http://o-x.fr ;
b) it used to link to two messages here http://o-x.fr/lsf being English index and http://o-x.fr/q2oe being French index concerning messages on another blog, whereas http://o-x.fr/foo linked to a denunciation of transhumanism as evolutionary project (on a previous blogger profile that was disconnected without me doing so);
c) there was also a lot of porn and medication links being shortened on http://o-x.fr but any link going to a bad site that had recently been clicked or shortened could be signalled to webmaster, so it was not a problem of daunting proportions;
d) I had written - among other things - creationist stuff on an MSN Group called Antimodernism too: it was disconnected with all other ones in February 2009: we got a warning and I managed to save some to this blogger profile in time. Unfortunately a man whom I had asked to help me in the saving of messages turned out to be a free mason. When I found out, I unfriended him at LinkedIn. But the damage was done: I had had insufficient access to internet during the interval to save all, he had been trusted and ... done nothing to save a single message as far as I could tell. Parts of my written production is gone. MSN's excuse was that they had found a better technology: I had a minor MSN Group which I tried to transfer, and it worked out miserably.

e) Now http://o-x.fr has been "not found on this server" since a cache 15 december. No news has been sent to anyone or anything in the media about the disappearance of a major internet utility like this URL shortener. Any one see some kind of pattern?
HGL

Are Creationist Ministries condemned Protestant Bible Societies?

2010-12-15T09:07:00.000-08:00

Here is what Pope Bl. Pius IX had to say about the latter:

14. The crafty enemies of the Church and human society attempt to seduce the people in many ways. One of their chief methods is the misuse of the new technique of book-production. They are wholly absorbed in the ceaseless daily publication and proliferation of impious pamphlets, newspapers and leaflets which are full of lies, calumnies and seduction. Furthermore, under the protection of the Bible Societies which have long since been condemned by this Holy See,[7] they distribute to the faithful under the pretext of religion, the holy bible in vernacular translations. Since these infringe the Church's rules,[8] they are consequently subverted and most daringly twisted to yield a vile meaning. So you realize very well what vigilant and careful efforts you must make to inspire in your faithful people an utter horror of reading these pestilential books. Remind them explicitly with regard to divine scripture that no man, relying on his own wisdom, is able to claim the privilege of rashly twisting the scriptures to his own meaning in opposition to the meaning which holy mother Church holds and has held. It was the Church alone that Christ commissioned to guard the deposit of the faith and to decide the true meaning and interpretation of the divine pronouncements.[9]

source

Or would a non-Protestant creationism arguer even be able to find support like Catholic priests approving his writings:

15. In order to check the contagion of bad books, it would be useful if your clerics who are renowned for sound doctrine likewise publish short works, to build up the faith to instruct the people. You would, of course, have to approve these before publication. Distribute these works and other useful and doctrinally sound authors among the faithful.

It hangs on what is doctrinally sound and on what is a daringly twisted vile meaning. I happen to have heard that one standard of creationist arguers, that strata as well may stem from the flood of Noa as from millions of years of calmer sedimentation was put forward by a Catholic scientist. And that Pope Pius IX made him knight of the order of st Gregory, or something.

Anyone know about that?

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Mouffetard/Paris V
15/XII/2010, Octave of
Immaculate Conception
(Encyclical cited from feast day itself)

I had a dream one night ...

2010-11-13T03:13:00.000-08:00

... yes, it does happen that I get some REM sleep (if remembering a dream when waking is a sure sign of having had such) and no, it was a dream in the sleep, not a day dream (political or otherwise) like MLK's famous "I have a dream" speech.

It happens that I remember no dreaming, only notice myself getting thoughts and sense impressions clearer when waking. It happens that I remember I had a dram involving such and such an oddity, and then forgetting all about it, because I do not want to or cannot reconstruct the dream. But this time I did collect the thoughts to get a somewhat clear sketch of what had gone on before I woke up.

A furry animal is designed - whether by speaker voice or by subtitles or simply by thought - as having been born with a trisomy. It survives. It grows up. And ...
...actually mates another animal with a trisomy in precisely the same chromosome pair: which gives rise to:
- 1/4 normally diploid, i e in that chromosome disomic animals
- 1/2 animals with trisomy in that chromosome (getting the extra somy from either father or mother) and
- 1/4 tetrasomic in that chromosome animals.
The tetrasomic animals mate. Not with normal animals, not with trisomic animals, but between themselves, and ...
... one day loses contact with the chromosomally normal population. Now they can only mate with other tetrasomic animals, and ...
... a few generations later the four somata of the chromosome pair diversify into two pairs. An animal population now has one chromosome pair more than its ancestors but not by splitting, so the newly twain pairs, replacing a one pair, have a normal chromosomal centricity, not telocentric, not necessarily very acrocentric either. Unless the original pair was so.

That's about when I woke up, or what I came to when remembering what I dreamt before waking up.

And how kind it is of someone to pray to God (or even to the demons, as far as int-ention towards me is concerned) that I get some kind of revelation of how evolution is a scientific possibility, now that there are so many Church men claiming Genesis must be reinterpreted or even ones who replace Apocalypse with "point Omega": if I came to believe in evolution, my harmony with them would be restored, they would not think themselves obliged to consider me as a fool, they would be so happy to welcome me back into full communion!

Now, what wild animals spontaneously do with misfits havingheart problems is not usually keep them alive three generations on a row. I may think Darwinism wrong about why one individual remains alive and another survives, I amy think chance or providence has more to do with it than any life force driving to perfection of species by survival of the fittest, but the scenario I dreamt of involves typically survival of the unfittest.

I do not ask you to take my word for it, do check out trisomy on wikipedia*, will you. There are more pairs than pair 21 that can be trisomic. ALL autosomic trisomies that do not involve spontaneous abortion involve heart troubles in men. ALL non-mozaïque forms of autosomous trisomy in bigger chromosomes gives rise to spontaneous abortion, as does also ALL non-mozaïque forms of triploidy. I do not see any reason why other mammals should have different placentas or hearts.

I am not sure the last step would fix the heart trouble about the formerly tetrasomic new karyotype, but I am sure the heart troubles involved in previous generations leading up to that would make success in competition for mating (and yes, mammals are typically competitive in that respect) rather unlikely.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
G. Pompidou/Beauborg
Paris IV
13/XI/2010

*Trisomy, Wikipedia - if you check links on that article, the diverse trisomies available in human genetic pathology do indicate on article after article heart deficiencies among symptoms. A man once told me his mother had adopted a lot of trisomy 21 lads, because their short life expectancy and immaturity for sin made them his intercessors in Heaven. Whether he lied about that or not (I have heard a lot of lies to test my credulity, and I am slow and polite) is immaterial: the observation about heart trouble is accurate.

PS: if I had been the son of such a mother, I would have been wise to treat my trisomic stepbrothers kindly. If they go to Heaven remembering ones kindness, they might intercede, otherwise their prayers might be like the saints who pray for the humiliation of the enemies of the Holy Church (Apocalypse ch. 11).

PPS: about "chromosome splits", I have already answered in Karyogrammata, modifying in comment that a result of two strictly telomeric chromosomes or one normal and one telomeric from one normal splitting would be possible: but two non-telomeric chromsomes would not be a possible result from such a split.

Both indexes have been updated, followers and readers!

2010-09-26T08:51:00.001-07:00

Another update on each - encore une mise à jour sur chaque index.

A good quote (from pakalert)

2010-09-08T04:17:00.000-07:00

My favorite propaganda trend in the mainstream media today is one directed at researchers like myself who expose the darker side of our economic and political environment. The term “Apocalypse Porn”, or “Doomer Porn”, is rising as the preferred Ad hominem attack on Liberty Movement writers, in place of “conspiracy theorist” which doesn’t seem to be working for them anymore. The MSM apparently spends more time trying to develop ‘memes’ like this than they do actually researching the so called news they propagate. The insinuation is that we either embellish data to make it seem more frightening than it actually is, or, that by reporting on valid but terrible news, we are a “danger” to society, because we perpetuate fear. Basically, it is the beginnings of an argument for suppression of 1st Amendment rights.

The reason the information we report on is disturbing is not because it is “bad”, but because it is TRUE. There are children who could make the distinction, but some full grown men and women seem to have difficulty with the concept. When the establishment says that we as researchers and alternative media do not have a right to spread facts that might upset you, what they are also saying is that you as an American cannot be trusted to act responsibly and constructively with the facts you are given. They are saying that they need to protect you from yourself. Who ever gave them permission to take on that job?

The Doomer Porn argument rings hollow because what I state here in these articles is entirely subject to your verification. If I embellish, or lie, I will be caught, and thus, my writing becomes meaningless. If I tell the truth, the hard truth, it is not up to me or the MSM or anyone else accept yourself to decide what you will do with it.

That guy* was talking about bad economics. I am talking - here - about bad science. Either way, listen carefully to what they say, when and if they warn you not to read me.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
8/IX/2010, Nativity of
The Blessed Virgin Mary
Bibl. Mouffetard, Paris V

*Source: Pakalert: Dangerous Economic Misconceptions

Am I foolish to say "Evolution of widely differring (mammal) species from each other is proven wrong"?

2010-09-06T11:46:00.000-07:00

I have basically said so on the blogpost Karyogrammata. Is that foolish? Should I not have shut up and waited till some real scientists tell me so?

Well, I think I would be stupid or even foolish to wait till "real scientists" tell me they are no longer evolutionist. Why?

Because they do not want to lose their jobs.

I was asking today in the automatic laundry for coins for washing. "Get a job" I was told. Some people seem to think having a paycheck makes you an honest man. That is not always so.

Thank you, O'Keefe, for reminding me!

HGL

"I tried to prove something, I found what I wanted, so I have proven it - Right?"

2010-08-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Read up on Christopher Columbus, will you!

Here is Encyclopedia Britannica, eleventh edition, online, right page.

As you will notice, he tried to prove one could get to India, he found land, was content with that, and assumed he had found India.

Not long ago, it was often said (like by Washinton Irving: a Disney comic, starring Goofy as Christopher Columbus, which I read as a child, repeated this except it ended in a flat earth joke) that he had proven the earth round.

Incidentally he had that once again, but it was already proven in another way. He knew it, his contemporaries knew it, saying it was not a spectacular thing.

When he adressed himself to the King of Portugal, first, he appeared uninterested, but he sent one ship without telling Columbus, and it came back with frightened sailors. So the reason he was at difficulties getting a crew in Spain, apart from the war against the Moors (and yes, Al-Andalus had been under Moors, and it is not certain popular feeling under them accepted learned astronomers' conclusions about earth's roundness) may well have been sailors in Spain getting bad news from the Portuguese ones.

But one main thing is: he found land West of Spain, he knew that on a globe India is West of Spain, he thought he had found India. Duh ...

"I tried to prove something, I found what I wanted, so I have proven it" - Wrong!

But that lesson, which can really be learned from Christopher Columbus is not taught very well in schools.

Darwin tried to prove all creatures share a common ancestor, so he proves all dove species have a common ancestor* by cross-breeding indirectly species that will not cross-breed directly - and he thinks an argument by parallel is licit:

Finally, then, varieties have the same general characters as species, for they cannot be distinguished from species, except, firstly, by the discovery of intermediate linking forms, and the occurrence of such links cannot affect the actual characters of the forms which they connect; and except, secondly, by a certain amount of difference, for two forms, if differing very little, are generally ranked as varieties, notwithstanding that intermediate linking forms have not been discovered; but the amount of difference considered necessary to give to two forms the rank of species is quite indefinite. In genera having more than the average number of species in any country, the species of these genera have more than the average number of varieties. In large genera the species are apt to be closely, but unequally, allied together, forming little clusters round certain species. Species very closely allied to other species apparently have restricted ranges. In all these several respects the species of large genera present a strong analogy with varieties. And we can clearly understand these analogies, if species have once existed as varieties, and have thus originated: whereas, these analogies are utterly inexplicable if each species has been independently created.

Origin of the Species, Ch. 2

But, here he goes beyond evidence. He has never cross-bred dove and eagle*, nor will he ever, not even with very many intermediates. He has never cross-bred bird and lizard, nor will he ever, not even with very many intermediates. He went beyond evidence. Yet he thought he had found an argument. Explaining the lack of argument by intermediates being lost is an explanation, but not an argument.

Similarily, Galileo did prove one argument for Geocentrism wrong, to wit that no heavenly body is seen circling any other body than earth: he proved Jupiter had a moon. But he did not prove Jupiter circling Sun were not indirectly circling, along with sun, earth. So: He did not disprove Geocentrism.

But he thought he had.

St Robert Bellarmine confronted him with a problem: if we move around the sun each year, we should see the stars move other way round each year, but we do not. Galileo explained that lack of evidence by telescope not magnifying enough.

On top of that he explained tides a wrong way and made a wrong test implication which a Portuguese Cardinal knew from experience was wrong. I have examined the new theory by Sir George Darwin here: it seems to fit Heliocentrism and Geocentrism equally well.

Later it was discovered stars are seen to move back and forth each year, in very strong telescopes - but only some of them. St Robert had probably meant seeing all stars in the sphere of fixed stars moving. As it is these only some stars moving do not prove a sphere of fixed stars being seen from a moving earth. They prove either one or another of two things: either the "fixed stars" are not fixed, but moving, or they are very unequal distances from us. We know from other observations, moving with respect to rest of fixed stars, but same direction year after year, that fixed stars may move. So, a moving earth is still not proven optically.

It was, by then however assumed that earth was proven moving by another reason or two:

1) Kepler had made a heliocentric model with ellipses, and the ellipses fit the observations;
2)Newton had explained movement in a very roundabout complex way, and the observed movements fit that explanation.

And so the discovery of stars moving back and forth each year was by Catholics under pressure from Masonic régimes (like in France) taken as final proof Galileo was right even if he could not actually prove it, and by the rest as a convenient way to measure distances of stars from solar system, according to how much or little earth's supposed ellipse around sun (optically and by day/night/seasons an ellipse of sun around earth in relation to "fixed stars" - that are not fixed - would work as well) reflects in this or that star's observed movement back and forth each year.

"Our opponent told us we would see this if we were right, we have seen it, so we are right - right?"

Wrong. You did not see what St Robert probably meant you would see if you were right, you saw something which is indecisive.

Then the distances measured by these assumptions - how this is done see this message over here on Trigonometry and astronomic applications - are taken as proof the heaven's cannot be circling earth each day and night. (This is a century later and a half later"parallax" was discovered before 1850, the "parallax measured distances" are used as an argument after 2000).* But if "fixed stars" are as close as fixed stars can be and just not fixed, that is not a valid proof either.

It would be if fixed stars were taken to be held together by a solid material known from earth, because tensions would make it break at far lesser speeds, but Geocentrism does not depend on fixed stars being in a solid sphere. Nor do our opponents (who are the mainstream, if you thought I did not know that) themselves count the "fixed stars" as either fixed or in a solid sphere.

Our senses are not absolutely decisive proof against Heliocentrism, insofar as there is an explanation, consistent with Heliocentrism, proposed by Galileo and by Copernicus already that explains why we see what we see, even if it is not the exact truth. But this explanation is less economic than the Geocentric explanation, that we see what we see because it is the exact truth in this matter. Saying we see what we see for some other reason, it may be possible in quite a few matters, but in each we should have an obvious reason for rejecting the obvious explanation that we see what is there to see.

A message on speeds related to Heliocentrism and Geocentrism and so far extant living human observers is here. And a debate about to begin with if moon landing could have been staged to sell the pictures of an earth turning around - I said there was a motive, but no real necessity to assume a fake - and further on Geocentrism between me and essentially two other writers is here.

So, do schools teach the lessons that are there to be learned from these cases?

No:

Christopher Columbus is still often taught to have proven the earth round, against the supposed adverse dogmaticism of the supposedly flat-earth fanatic Mediæval Church.
Galileo is taught as having proven Heliocentrism, by discovering moons around Jupiter and by giving a non-direct explanation of our sight and balance sensations in case Heliocentrism is assumed right.
Darwin is assumed to have proven his point.

And if it is remembered that Columbus thought he had found India, it is always thought of ass a little sad joke about him, never as a lesson in logic. Because if it were, it would be obvious that Galileo, Darwin and others too might have over-interpreted a success in the experiments.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Mouffetard, Paris V
14/VIII/2010
Dormition of the Blessed Virgin

*Dove species having a common ancestor is an example of what in Creationist circles is known as micro-evolution (small [change] evolution), and has been proven, dove and eagle having a common acestor is referred to as macro-evolution (big [change] evolution) and has never been observed or proven in itself.

**Funny enough, as I was writing on this paragraph the window closed down, Blogger is great by its automatic saving device. I reconnected on Mouffetard library computer n°10 at 13:41 o' clock p.m.

Human population after Noah, racial and demographic pseudoproblems for creationism

2010-06-18T03:58:00.001-07:00

Numbers: if Noah and three sons with wives were only people alive some five thousand years ago, why are we so many?

A man becomes fertile at fourteen, give and take some years, very extreme limits being nine and eighteen. For a woman the extreme limits are the same, but the mean puberty is twelve. She rests fertile until c. age 60. A man rests unctionnally fertile longer.

A pregnancy takes nine months, but ideally one spaces them out one in two years. You start off with three couples - presuming Noah and wife had no further children, besides where would a fourth son have gotten his wife from? - and their sons (enumerated in Genesis) are free to marry first cousins, but not siblings.

If each one of them has enough empty space and good health, and so on ... the present population would have been reached very long ago.

So why are we so few?

The reasons are sufficiently different among themselves to spare us any so called responsibility for keeping us "few enough".

Colours: if all races - black, white, red and yellow - descend from Shem, Ham and Japheth with wives some five thousand years ago, why are we so different?

Linking to a picture of Halle Berry.

She belongs to the black community of US. Why? Because there are these ethnic communities there, and because solidarity - previously exclusion too - where strong within (previously against) that particular community.

In France 150 years ago, she would have been accepted as a "Caucasian" (White). Alexandre Dumas the Elder was 1/4 grandparents black ancestry, 3/4 grandparents white ancestry. A. D. the Younger was 1/8 great-grandparents black and 7/8 great-grandparents white. He had blue eyes. If he looked a bit more white than Halle (except that or if she has naturally straight hair), his father looked a bit more black than she. Today, here, she might (except she is allready known) pass for a Gipsy, Arab or South Spanish woman. The near extremes of skin colour are then 8 ancestors getting or loosing a melanine gene. Sometimes there is a place for the saying "difference is only skin deep".

Both: how did the races get to the places, like Ararat is no where near either Manhattan or Easter Island?

When I formulated the objection, and included Easter Island, some of you may have guessed I was thinking of Thor Heyerdahl. He was not a creationist, we know from some of his writings he was not just agnostic but a believing Old Earth Evolutionist. He did nothing of what he did harbouring the intention himself of proving creationism possible on this account, but we know he did prove the population of Americas and Oceania after Ararat by boat a technical possibility. The raft he used for Perù Polynesia and the Reed Boat he used for Heliopolis - Americas were well within technical know-how of Noah with immediate successors. As for the official 20.000 years since Americas were populated, that may very well be a misdating (problems of C14 for very old dates are dealt with by other creationist authors).

Even without Thor Heyerdahl, Easter Island proves "by itself" (or by being populated before Roggeveen, Cook, Bougainville et al.) that population of continents across the sea have been possible before Columbus.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Day of St Ephrem
18/VI/2010
Bibl. Clignancourt
75018 Paris

But believing in Noah and his sons makes you a racist, right?

2010-06-04T09:05:00.001-07:00

Ham was cursed for laughing at his father, and blacks descend from Ham, so believing this makes you "black submissionist", right?

Wrong:

Ham, when committing his crime, was an adult, even a father. The blacks descend from Kush, one of his sons. The one son who was cursed along with his father was Canaan.

That curse was already fulfilled by Joshua (descending from Shem) and Scipio (descending from Japheth) conquering realms of the Canaaneans/Phœnicians (descending from Ham's son Canaan) and thereby ending a very bad kind of child hating idolatry.

Just for noting it .../HGL

PS:

Racism has a recently strong foundation in Darwinism:

A) Polygenism of humanity arguing that Blacks and Whites reach manhood from different lines of Homo Erectus - has, seems, been refuted, but that was after WW-2

B) "Survival of the fittest" arguing against a morality common to all mankind.

Thereby arguing against moral indignation against slave hunters.

/HGL

PPS:

Already stated this, says something about politics around certain places that I was actually called "Ham" as opposed to "Hans" in one place last week. I so prefer keeping to the point rather than refuting what should not need refutation ...

Pour francophones tendance monoglottes, sur un autre blog

2010-06-04T05:22:00.000-07:00

et, sur un autre blog encore, le dialogue FB qui commence sur un autre thème mais conduit à:
Non, la Ste Jehanne d'Arc n'est pas une manif raciste ...
...et Pie XII n'a pas interdit le créationnisme ...et (juste dans les commentaires)...les orthodoxes sont un peu plus antiromains que les Tradis même sédisvacantistes

Statistiques pour cette page.

If you are creationist, that means you are ...

2010-05-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

... Lubavitcher?
... Moslem?
... Born Again Bible Christian without any Pope above self?

Short of it is: no, you cannot be all of these, it might mean one as well as other, or neither but something else.

I am Catholic. I was just in a French FB debate defending the rights of Catholics to be creationist.

... Stupid?
... Having Cognitive Problems?

Now, that is very self serving of evolutionists to think so. If they do that.

... A Sceptic who does not accept any proof as valid?

Same response. Telling people "that creationist is intelligent, but he does not believe one can prove reality is more than his own illusion" or some similar ultra-sceptic idiocy attributed to me is a means of trying to scare people away from my creationist writings.

I do accept certain proofs as valid, even parts of evolutionist proofs. But I do not accept certain other proofs as valid. One I do not accept as validly proving evolutionist scenario against young earth creationist scenario is "there are millions of concurring facts" when each of them is just as much a proof of a young earth scenario, since completely compatible with it.

... Geocentric?

Indeed I am. Each proof that "earth turns around its own axis in 24 h." is compatible with universe turning around earth's axis in 24 h. Each optical proof that "all planets including earth" turn around sun is compatible with sun and moon turning around earth in year and moon, and other close celestial bodies, around sun.

In the case of circumstantial evidence being not clearly favouring one of either alternatives, I opt for the most straightforward evidence: eyes and balance sense about earth standing still, history, even holy history, about earth being created nearly within the span of human existence and there being a line, a lineage, from first man to survivor of flood, from survivor of flood to Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus Christ.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Friday before Pentecost
2010, Paris, Beaubourg

... not yet married?

How did you know? Did they harass creationists at your school too, so they got no girl friends?

Followers

2010-05-21T02:30:00.000-07:00

I have followers on some blogs: musicalia, deretour, Philologica, Morphologia Latina and Gm b1 lou, of late also on Creation vs Evolution all of which are functional in English. Same goes for Recipes from Home and Abroad.

If some of you got on to more blogs that might interest you, there might be some debates in comment sections.

She put this anyway as well as I could (so I link)

2010-05-18T09:21:00.000-07:00

Too much information
from early stage of conversion story of Jennifer

Those REAL Old Jamborees ...

2010-05-18T08:24:00.000-07:00

...written for those really gorgeous girls who gave me French fries in Jardin des Plantes, especially the one lying face to face with me when we sat up

As you have maybe already seen, I am not arguing againts Carbon 14 dating in English, because there is already so much about it on the web (French is another thing). I assume you know why I do not think it proves ages beyond Biblical dating.

So, if earth was created some 7200 or a little more years ago and Adam started farming immediately, if there was originally no C14 in atmosphere, if the C14 in atmosphere has been slowly building up - what are the consequences?

I am in a relaxed mood, not trying to refute or prove beyond dispute. Just: what are the consequences?

One is, you would expect to find historic material dated wrong period, and yes, if Troy was taken 1184 BC, if Hissarlik in Turkey is Troy, then Troy VI or VII would be some 100 - 200 years dated too old, if it was the right one, and even more so if Troy II was the right one, as Schliemann thought.

Another consequence is of course that Neanderthal finds, Dordogne finds, Atapuerca finds (and that is in Monte de Ocas, not far from Burgos) are dated way too old, thousands of years too old. And that these people really were contemporary with men we read of in the Bible, like ... maybe these men before the Flood. But the men before the flood were highly technological, the men in Neanderthal and Dordogne, the men or creatures in Atapuerca were so not?

Lets grab your Chesterton, Everlasting Man: if the painted grottos of Lascaux may just as well have been very old Kindergardens, for all we know, the dwellings of cavemen may very well have been very old, and I mean REAL old jamborees.

I suppose you all know Baden Powell wrote Scouting for Boys. And that since boy scouts and girl guides have been going on jamborees. Well, on a jamboree you deny yourself part of the conforts of civilisation don't you? For all we know, at least the clearly human bones may have been from people dying on a jamboree from a very much more civilised Nod, east of Eden.

Not meaning every practise was according to the Scout law. It seems the Cro Magnon race widely practised anthropophagy a k a cannibalism. So did, by the way, very recently some people of Papuan race. Both for enemies and for dead relatives. And Nod itself too, though civilised, was a city state where evil grew, eventually attracting God's punishment, the Flood.

Speaking of jamborees, even after the Flood some people seem to have started as jamborees, the Amish being a very moderate, peaceful, decent and recent case in point. I think Red Indians N and S of Maya-Aztec-Peruvian high and cruel civilisations started like that.

So next time you read about Rahan, the son of the wild ages (Rahan, le fils des ages farouches), watch out for Cainite ancestors ...

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Buffon, Paris V
18^th of May, St Eric of Sweden
in YooL 2010

Welcome to Michael!

2009-12-23T03:00:00.001-08:00

Mike Fan is welcome too.

If we get into comments debates on any post you are free to post links to it wherever you like.

Tykhon and Pius XII ...

2009-08-31T11:33:00.000-07:00

Both had to deal with Communists who were dogmatically for evolution. Both had to deal with them when they were destroying the Church, like murdering Russian Orthodox or like imprisoning Cardinal Mindszenty. Both (unless it was the successor of Tykhon in the case of Patriarchate of Moscow) allowed their flocks to not oppose evolution.

Also, Communists were for contraception. Patriarchate of Moscow allowed the pill in 1970's. Pius XII allowed periodical abstinence in the fertile periods. They broke with the past and with each other there.

ROCOR, notably Fr Seraphim Rose, opposed the Patriarchate of Moscow on precisely these two, among other accounts. Pius XII not only helped Wojtyla, but also Ratzinger to become famous theologians bending down to fashion - and later bishops and popes. The problem is: after two evolutionist popes, evolution starts to feel normal for Catholics, just as it feels normals for the Orthodox adhering to clergy until recently under Communism. And so do the deviations from traditional marital practise which not only is against pill (et c) but also for periodical abstince precisely the other way round, in infertile periods - when both spouses agree - or unrelated, when it is for prayer - like nights before a Sunday (especially if receiving Holy Communion) and so on.

But if deviation from the normal feels normal on both subjects and because ultimately of Communist persecutions ... how is truth being kept in Church? It seems to me, small groups on both sides of the schism preserve truth intact on both these issues. And both Paul VI and a recent Russian synod each preserved their half of the truth in what they condemned: the pill and the periodical abstinence imposed on the other spouse for sake of contraception. But Vatican and Moscow still feel evolution as something normal for a Christian to believe. Which it is not.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
ut supra

Why is teaching evolution so IMPORTANT?

2009-08-31T10:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a link. http://o-x.fr/e0c (E zero C) is the short url for it.

Here is an extract (yes, it is Dawkins writing):

To return to the enlightened bishops and theologians, it would be nice if they’d put a bit more effort into combating the anti-scientific nonsense that they deplore. All too many preachers, while agreeing that evolution is true and Adam and Eve never existed, will then blithely go into the pulpit and make some moral or theological point about Adam and Eve in their sermons without once mentioning that, of course, Adam and Eve never actually existed! If challenged, they will protest that they intended a purely “symbolic” meaning, perhaps something to do with “original sin”, or the virtues of innocence. They may add witheringly that, obviously, nobody would be so foolish as to take their words literally. But do their congregations know that? How is the person in the pew, or on the prayer-mat, supposed to know which bits of scripture to take literally, which symbolically? Is it really so easy for an uneducated churchgoer to guess? In all too many cases the answer is clearly no, and anybody could be forgiven for feeling confused. Think about it, Bishop. Be careful, Vicar. You are playing with dynamite, fooling around with a misunderstanding that’s waiting to happen — one might even say almost bound to happen if not forestalled.

Playing with dynamite? Why? If evolution were true, if doubting it were outside the reasonable or the sane, as he says ... here:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact. The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust.

... why is it so dreadfully catastrophic to disbelieve it?

When Sherlock Holmes heard Dr Watson explain about heliocentrism, and the latter made sure he had completely understood, he said: "now I shall be in a hurry to forget it". Why? "Because it makes no difference for life on this earth with which I am concerned." I am quoting A Study in Scarlet (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) from memory. But for our daily life now, what should be so important about billions or only thousands of years, of Adam or of some kind of apes (like Ramapithecus, not like its present day other descendants, according to evolutionism, chimps and gorillas)?

I was asking in French about Dawkins' colleague, Michel Onfray (short url http://o-x.fr/s5-): if there be no immortal gods, no heaven no hell, no angels and no devils, and no day of judgement, against whom is it then sinful to neglect the one world there is? Equally, if there be no creator, if we have no immortal souls, what is so grave about neglecting it? Whom are we then thankless against, and what are we then neglecting to take care of?

It used to be said for atheism, that precisely for this reason it was more tolerant than religion. We have just seen Dawkins rejecting tolerance and broadmindedness in this matter for the most bigotted narrowmindedness there is now, beside some versions of Islam and of Communism. Why?

I can only say: either it is a move to back up "the other side" against - the combination of Islam and Christian Fundamerntalists! - OR it is about "free sex", about "come on baby, were nothing but mammals, let's do it like they do in the Discovery Channel" - except that of course "free sex" is very unlike general mammal behaviour in excluding, often enough, babies. Either it is very partisan polemics or it is squint-eyed publicity for pills and other things that Christian couples do not even like to talk about.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Paris IV, BpI/G. Pompidou
18/31 August YooL 2009

PS, Here is Chesterton quoted on the matter (read link, scroll slowly down a page or two while reading). Short url: http://o-x.fr/e4e

What I did not write, and where you can find it

2009-08-05T04:01:00.000-07:00

In English, I find no utility in writing myself about some things since it is all in E. H. Andrews' From Nothing to Nature, which I read at age twelve (I read books about evolution by evolutionists from age six and on). It's Swedish translation is called Ur Intet.

Same arguments are sometimes also available on Kent Hovind's drdino site (whose theology I am not bound to share beyond literal truth of Genesis), where he adds cryptozoology and "living fossiles" for non-exstinction of "fossile species". Links in parentheses are to categories of this site, since it is no use linking to chapters in an absent book. If I reread it, I can give chapter numbers).

stratigraphy see Fossils and Ancient Man Series
C14 dating see Radiometric articles
Uranium-Lead dating,
Thorium-Lead dating,
apart from these four, see here, Dr Dino Age of Earth related articles
nor about irreducible complexity of eyes, (see here)
and impossibility or so of life coming into existance from the non living, (see here)
nor about fossilic non-existence of intermediate forms between fish, quadrupede, bird, biped as forms of locomotion, (I did not find this on drdino)
nor about Flood Geology, (see here)

One more thing: it is for creationism - rebuttals of Darwinism, possible explanations of scientific problems in Bible account, not for evangelical theology that I turn to these authors. Nor for complete religious meaning of Genesis, which I rather seek in relation to Christ, in the Church Fathers. Light was created on a Sunday, because Resurrection and Pentecost were to happen on Sundays. Man was created along with irrational beasts, on a Friday, because on Good Friday Christ remade what went wrong with man's creation, but some refused to be remade and knew not what they did. Eve came from Adam's side when he slept, as the Church from the side of Christ opened by the lance, when he had given up his mortal life for us.

I may very well have repeated things stated by Chesterton about Monkey trial et c.:

On Darwinism and Mystery From The Illustrated London News 21st August, 1920. -- text (8K)
The Persecution of Religion From The Illustrated London News 8th March, 1924 -- text (9K)
The Advantages of having One Leg From Tremendous Trifles 1909 -- text (8K) -- html (8K)
Doubts About Darwinism From The Illustrated London News 17th July 1920 -- text (9K) -- html (10K)
American Fundamentalists and the English Journalists From The Illustrated London News 1st August 1925 -- text (9K) -- html (10K)
Compulsory Education and the Monkey Trial From The Illustrated London News 8th August 1925 -- text (10K) -- html (10K)

This here is from TFP Student Action, and says Peking Man and Java Man are probably as fake as Piltdown man, but it cannot be tested: here.

Index to English Crea-vs-Evolu-series

2009-08-03T07:51:00.000-07:00

As regards title, crea is short for creation or creationism, not for creatine (I had to delete a publicity for the latter in the comments, it is so irrelevant)

Théologie et philosophie (yes, English message, but French title, since once upon a time French did those things a little better) with a follow up here: Are Creationist Ministries condemned Protestant Bible Societies?

Karyogrammata (Greek title means: description chromosome numbers/chromosome configurations, and includes all posts from deretour that relate to the subject in English) - theme continued on I had a dream one night ... and Another Possibility

Includes post Non-replies, which refers to Citing, again Ian Johnson, which is included in:

Minor messages on English Crea-vs-Evolu series the last part of which is the comments on first big post. What about Dinosaurs?

Whew, eight messages boiled down to three, plus one index message!
What I did not write, and where you can find it
Why does this matter?
A: the beauty and harmony in complexity of creation is one argument for the existence of a Creator. Evolution may be accepted by Christians, but it is mainly accepted because of atheism, though that is (only) indirect(ly so) in Christians accepting it.
B: if our evolutionary past is mud, amoeba, trilobite, fish, amphibian, reptile, rat-like first mammal, primates, apes, "Lucy" - where is then our dignity?
And God's justice and mercy if cats chase little birdies and both kittens and birds die without anyone previously sinning. No, Adam sinned before this happened.
C: if our evolutionary future is collective world wide glory, where is then our freedom?
Resist Meta Man! is about this third problem. So is another blog's Distributism vs. Evolution which is a review of one aspect of three major works of Chesterton.
Why is teaching evolution so IMPORTANT? is about the freedom of thought and of parenting which modernity is abandoning.
Tykhon and Pius XII ... is about the reaction of Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches.

Newer parts:

On other blogs:

Other languages:

Pour francophones tendance monoglottes, sur un autre blog

Statistics for this page

Minor messages on English Crea-vs-Evolu series

2009-08-03T07:32:00.000-07:00

Citing, again, Ian Johnston
Ancient Sea Scorpion, News Stor with Comments
Good News, bad news, old news
Comments on above
Comments on first post (the long one)

Citing, again, Ian Johnston:

He claims to have proven species to species evolution, like this:

First, there is variety in the natural world (that is self-evident). Second, all living individuals must have come from a living parent (no one has ever been able to prove the contrary). And third, simple species were around long before more complex species (any inspection of fossilized sedimentary strata confirms this point).

Second is invalid in the modality must. The burden of proof rests not on alleged alternative possibility, but on alleged necessity. God almighty, if such there be, obviously (by definition) can create an individual without using the normal procedure of a parent or two.

Third presupposes that geological layers be accepted as temporal in successive small disasters, rather than local in one great flood. For which there is cumulative historic evidence outside Genesis too. But this point has been made over and over again by creationists, only some do not want this point to be made in class.

Ancient Sea Scorpion (News story, with comments)

series---see comment for full index

"LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have found the fossilized claw of a 2.5-metre (8-foot) sea scorpion, a nightmarish creature living before the age of dinosaurs.

The discovery of the 390-million-year-old specimen in a German quarry suggests prehistoric spiders, insects and crabs were much larger than previously thought, researchers at Britain's Bristol University said on Wednesday."

...

Read on at source.

Comment: how is it dated at 390 million years? Historic dating, i e written record? No, nay, never, that has not been going on for 400 000 000 years or more. Dendrochronology? Nix, that stops short at 20 000 years before present - and if the matches are not all of them absolutely sure, it might even be compatible with Biblical chronology.

Radiocarbonic dating? Nope. In a 390 million old fossile, if such a thing is, there can be no measurable C14, if the method is at all reliable. Which means that a fossile dated at 390 millions cannot contain measurable amounts of C14.

Uranium/lead or thorium/lead proportions? I do not think fossiles contain uranium or lead; thorium or lead, though I might be mistaken.

My hunch is: age was identified by geological layer according to a method not without absurdities.

A: fossiles are divided into layers. Sedimentation lines help, each one being a layer in miniature. Essentially though, the layers that count are divided according to fossiles contained. A fossile out of its typical layer or layers is thought of as accidentally misplaced.

B: the total age of a chronological layer, defined as above, is calculated according to its age where it is thickest. Period is period - and times runs no different on two different places, right? Only, see underlined criterium above. One cannot really know that all fossiles of layer Jurassic was before of all of layer Tertiary all over the world. It is presumed as known, in order to facilitate this age dating. It is not known.

C: the age of a layer, where it is thickest, is calculated according to the slowest known rate of sedimentation, though higher rates are known even today and can be presumed for natural disasters, like deluge.

D: the total age is then caculated by adding the ages of layers, including the ones missing then and there.

Which means that if all the presumed layers had been in place in that quarry, one would have had to dig very much deeper to find anything as old as 390 million years.

Source for this critical explanation of geological dating, with critique on other dating methods: From Nothing to Nature (It was years since I read the book, though.)

Comment: if it is actually younger, have humans seen things like that? Well, heroic legend tells of men confronting monsters, does it not? And Assyrian sculptural art shows monster scorpions, does it not?

Read this too:

"An enormous sea-scorpion more than two metres long once roamed the shallow seas of what is now Germany, according to palaeontologists.

One of the beast's 30-centimetre petrified claws was found at a quarry near Prum, Germany.

The scientists said the claw belonged to a prehistoric relative of the modern scorpion that lived in the sea around 400 million years ago." Source

So, it is not a giant sea scorpion that has been found, only a claw that could belong to one! That is paleontological method in a nutshell.

/Hans Lundahl edited

PS: newslinks seem to have expired, since then ... Here is a new one ...

Good News, bad news, old news:

Father Stephen tells the good news that the Bible is all about

St Peter tells part of the bad news that parts of the Bible are about

Father Stephen may have been in fear about the flood. The fearful thing is not if it were incorrect, but if, it being correct, we should merit even worse things. Which is why I believe in both flood and baptism as believed by 2000 years of Holy Church.

A commenter (David) wrote:

Since I’m not a scholar, I have to trust other posters that say prefigurment = patristic and patristic = only valid interpretation, end of story. I just don’t see it.

Thing is, yes, patristic interpretation is only valid interpretation, but no, prefigurement is not all there is to patristic interpretation. Every event throughout history (including Life of Brian, the movie, and the holy life of Fr Bryan Houghton, centered on Holy Liturgy; including the Mosaic rites for Iôm Kippûr that prefigure Crucifixion as well as the new ones introduced after the destruction of Jerusalem that postfigure baptism) has some connection with Christ, this being especially true for those deigned to be recorded in either Patriarchal, Mosaic, priestly/royal and of course Apostolic traditions. But this does not mean they are not events that are in the prosaic way of seing things other than the christology they prefigure or post-figure. And patristic interpretation knew this. St Augustine of Hippo wrote that it is heretical to believe the flood only as about Noah's time or only as about the Church outside which there is no salvation, but Catholic to believe it as about both. Here is another part of what he wrote too, but scroll down to chapter 27.

Same David:

If there was a real human being Jonathan and we actually have a reasonable facsimile of his actual words and deeds, to say that he’s some prefigurment of Christ is to deny, in part, his personhood.

Well, no. Being persons means being created in God's image. In image of divine persons. So prefiguring Christ does not take away personhood from King David, who was meek with his enemy Saul, who reigned among gentiles before getting his own back with the Jews, who killed lions to protect his lambs, et c.

Father Stephen wrote:

The same fear drives the concern for the Flood of Noah and the age of the planet (not to mention any possible hint of evolutionary science). Thus the earth must be young, the flood must be literal (with perhaps a still existing Ark on Mt. Ararat). Science has an answer that it must prove, rather than a question to be answered. The agenda of such fundamentalist science is set by the need to refute anything that possibly undermines a peculiar view of Scripture. One flaw and the entire house of cards comes tumbling down.

It makes for bad science and even worse Biblical interpretation.

The problem about nervousness, trying to prove an answer and bad science is not unique to the fundamentalist side. Indeed, if, as I think, Darwinian side is anyway obliged to prove what is false, their science will by that suffer even more than by people trying to prove what is correct.

Father Stephen, in a previous post quoted St Irenaeus:

And for this reason, when at this present time the Law is read by the Jews, it is like a myth, for they do not possess the explanation [exegesis] of all things which pertain to the human advent of the Son of God: but when it is read by Christians, it is a treasure, hid in a field, but brought to light by the Cross of Christ, and explained ...

Myth in that epoch meant simply story. St Irenæus was not saying that Jews were wrong about history, only that they lacked the key to history. As is still the case. Romulus and Remus would agreably have been called a myth back then, but Romulus and Remus were taken as historical. History meant research, as in comparing different versions, myth was any version just accepted - in Aristotle's Poetics it means both traditional story and story-line/plot of a tragedy. Chronicle, as in writing down the most indubitable events as soon as one knows they happened is yet another thing. Point is: myth is not opposed to true history, but true historic events can be known by chronicle, myth or "history" i e historic research. From Jewish as well as Christian perspective, Pagan myths about creation and flood appear as more or less right in story line but not a clue about the meaning. In St Irenæus, it is all historic events other than Incarnation that need exegesis to be truly understood. Jews are not so much more privileged than Pagans, after all. At least not after their rejecting Christ, who is the keystone of all created reality. When it comes to the banal question "did it happen or not happen" neither Jews nor Pagans, neither OT or Pagan myths, need be seen as totally off the hook. To St Augustine, their was no doubt Romulus and Remus lived, problem is the Pagans thought their luck came from descending from Venus through Æneas and Romulus from Mars. To St Irenæus, talmudic or rather closely pretalmudic thought about OT events is about as worthless as paganism.

In comments to that earlier post, David wrote:

but I’d love to see someone offer up an extremely challenging passage (pick a favorite time where Israel is told to commit genocide or something equally offensive to a modern mind like the destruction of Sodom) and view it in it’s liturgical and/or Christ prefiguring context.

Why not take destruction of Egyptian army? The drowning soldiers of Pharao "are" the drowning demons at Gadara, which prefigure baptismal exorcism. As for Sodom's, why not pick up St Augustine's De Civitate Dei (XVI, scroll down to chapters 29 and 30)? In his De Trinitate, the two angels (out of three that had visited Abraham) were the Son and the Holy Spirit. Though that work contains a conclusion that differs from St Photios about a more closely trinitarian matter.

Comments on above:

Hans Lundahl a dit...
from "Father Stephen wrote: The same fear drives ..." was added today, down to "Though that work contains a conclusion that differs from St Photios about a more closely trinitarian matter."
25 février 2009 05:10
Hans Lundahl a dit...
Here is a third post of Father Stephens
25 février 2009 05:16
Hans Lundahl a dit...
Here is another guy who has no clue about History, another pagan believer in Mars and Venus, by the way ...
25 février 2009 05:49 Hans Lundahl a dit...
Somewhere St Augustine argues against the existencer of antipods.Antipods of Milan (where he studied under St Ambrose), those of Hippo Regia - a city further south - being obviously further north.
23 mars 2009 03:35

Comments on first post (the real long one):

Hans Lundahl a dit...
Orthodoxy and Creationism by Deacon Andrew Kuraev
23 décembre 2008 09:26
Hans Lundahl a dit...
Genesis and Early Man, by Fr Seraphim Rose against Dr Kalamiros
23 décembre 2008 09:29
Hans Lundahl a dit...
"An article entitled The Eternal Will was printed in The Christian Activist Volume 11, Fall/Winter 1997. It was a lecture given by Dr. Alexander Kalomiros on evolution vs. creationism and his interpretation of the traditional teachings by the Fathers of the Orthodox Church about Genesis. This is a response to Dr. Kalomiros by Fr. Seraphim Rose. It has been excerpted for length by Frank Schaeffer."(from article)

Karyogrammata

2009-08-02T07:04:00.001-07:00

Chromosome numbers, first published on Communities dot com · · · Undisputed facts · Hypothesis I · Hypothesis II · Hypothesis III · Hypothesis IV · Overall criticism

Update on Chromosome numbers · · · Talkorigins explains on human-chimp situation · my footnotes on this post · a little excursus on French language history

Speciation observed - but not in mammals · · · a wannna-read

Non-replies · · · comments part on non-replies, mostly links about chromosomal polymorphism

Chromosome numbers - the summing up · · · Kent Hovind's list of chromosome numbers of different species, plus one other linkComments part

Chromosome numbers, first published on Communities dot com:

series---see comment for full index

Undisputed facts:

mammal a, say man, has 46 chromosomes
mammal b, say chimp, has 48 chromosomes
mammal c, say a lemur, has over 80 chromosomes.

They are all mammals, all chromosomes go diploid they are all supposed to have a common ancestor - *the first primate (none identified, but that is another problem)

---
Hypothesis I 46>48 or: 23*2>24*2

Stage one: 46>47
- by trisomy from one parent the new individual has the usual haploid set from another the haploid set has an extra chromosome, because both from one pair came along but this does not mean the new individual has 23 pairs and an extra foreign to pairs: it means that one of the 23 ordinarily pairs is trisomatic;

stage two: 47=47 or>46(=original 46)

if the individual formed in stage one couples itself with individuals that still have 46, the offspring will from that individual have either the ordinary haploid set or the set with two chromosomes for one pair-to-be, giving either individuals of 46 chromosomes or those that have the same trisomy as trisomic parent;

stage three: 47>48 or=47 or>46(=original 46)

Mendel's laws would indicate 25% 48 chromosomes, 50% 47 chromosomes, 25% 46 chromosomes But even so, the original pairs will not have changed. The two extra chromosomes will still be at one with two normal ones - one pair that should have been will be a tetrasomy;

stage four: 48=48?
How does this stabilise at 48, at a tetrasomy?

stage five: 48=22*2+1*4>24*2?
How does a tetrasomy become two pairs?

---
Hypothesis II 48>46 or: 24*2>23*2

stage one: 48>47 from one parent the offspring has ordinary set (1, 2, 3 ... 24), from other one with fusion (1/2, 3 ... 24) How does this hang together? 1 and 2 from the one parent should each have a centromere, while 1/2 from the other has only one. That is unworkable. End of hypothesis II, I think. The stage three 47>46 is not likely to happen at all.**

Including mammal c - and that must be in order to account for all mammals - means accounting for this difficulty not only once, but several times.

---
update, March 21/April 3:

Hypothesis III 46>48 or: 23*2>24*2, but by fission, not trisomy.

Stage one, 46>47?:
from one parent a chromosome has been inherited divided into two. Problem: it had only one centromere part, and each chromosome needs one in mammals (poultry have microchromosomes without centromeres, mammals have not).

Adjusting hypothesis:
the half that did not get one from whre it should got a centromere by chromosome crossing. Problem: that means it has gained a bit, but also lost a bit, whether from the chromosome's partner or from quite another chromosome

Correlate: that means there is chromosomal unbalance in this individual. Chromosome N meets either chromosome Na or chromosome Nb. It cannot meet both. Say it meets chromosome Na, that means chromosome Nb is superfluous and potentially damaging. And single. There is no guarantee whatsoever it will get along where chromosome Na goes in terms of ovula or spermatozoa. Supposing the mammal that has this superfluous chromosome outside the pairs will live to develop such and hand them on.

Stage two, 47=47 (or >46): same problem as for hypothesis I. Plus the fact that it may be Nb that joins with the N from non-mutated parent.

Stage three, 47>48 (or=47, or>46):
Here is where possibly Na meets Na and Nb meets Nb. Though it is extremely unlikely. And Where functions of Na and Nb diversify rather than having the functions of N plus a non-useful N+function.

Stage four, 48=48:
In order for this to happen, the individual from Stage three must meet another individual that also has the new chromosome couples Na+ Na and Nb+Nb. Which is even less likely in that first crucial generation. But where this to happen, stage five were no problem.

---
Hypothesis IV, 48>96 or 2*24>4*24>2*48:
Polyploidy is not observed in mammals. Poultry and lizards, as well as fish have been observed to give rise to triploid individuals, either infertile or parthenogenetical females. Batrachians have tetraploid and octoploid varieties (notably of a kind of salamander). But mammals are strictly diploid. Probably the placental implantation gets disturbed when the chromosome number is too diverse between mother and offspring. Poultry, lizards and batrachians have no placentas.

Stage one, 2*24>4*24 (or rather 3*24, if the production of gamete was correct from other parent) will therefore not happen.

Stage two, if stage one had happened, would be one gamete from tetraploid parent, 2*24 meeting one from ordinary parent not mutating, i e 1*24 would end the line, because the result would be, again, 3*24, i e an individual outside all future sexual reproduction. Or the extremely unlikely chance of meeting another 2*24 straight away, preserving overall 4*24 and making it synonymous to stages two, three and four.

Stage five, 4*24>2*48:
Here we are talking near impossible. Or forget about "near". Here it is a question of not one, but 24 tetrasomies diversifying to each two pairs.

---
Overall criticism: we do not find mammal populations (as far as the present author knows) with stable tetrasomies. Still less with half the genome in tetrasomies and the other half diploid. We do not find mammal species diversifying even like 46>48 or 48>46 within known observation. **

Dog races (breeds, therefore populations) have been diversified as much as any mammal within the historic observation man has had over dogs, for however long it is both species have existed. A dog has the same chromosome number as a dog.

The only suspicions would be man 46 alongside apes (chimps, gorillas, orang utangs) 48 and horse 48° alongside Przewalski's horse 46°. But these have not diversified within known historic observation like dog breeds. Their diversification is only presumed by evolutionists. What Darwin observed on ring species in terms of dove species in Europe and possibly finches on Galapagos Islands would therefore seem to be limited to species indirectly but fertilely interbreedable by sharing same chromosome numbers. Furthermore, Wikipedia which gives a lot of species constants for animal species does not include chromosome numbers, which is a species constant. Why? Because drawing attention to chromosome numbers might raise doubts about evolution, I suspect.

°Once I read, though it may have been a misprint, that these were the chromosome numbers for horse and Przewalski's horse. On internet sources I find nothing on Przewalski's horse, but I find horse as 64. Which is which, now?

*but see update on okapis
**diversifying within human observation means diversifying in the timespan observed by us
update: here's an article where is claimed evolution could have been disproven but hasn't

Update on Chromosome numbers:

Talkorigins January 99 was the last look I had on Chromosome numbers, my earlier post depends on that info. Talkorigins July 05 adds information, if you scroll down a bit.

Yes, it seems that uneven chromosome numbers from different parents do occur in okapis, and that one chromosome from one may mate with two chromosomes from other: individuals with 22, 23 or 22.5 chromosome pairs (44, 46 or 45 chromosomes). No other mammals than okapis have been sighted so far*. The variations in number would still seem to come about by fusion or - though not in this case - polyploidy. And apart frogs, it would seem that rodents too can be polyploid.**

I take the freedom to quote the last talkorigins, after he has answered on chromosome numbers:

Here's your budding tree.
common ancestor       Chimp ancestor (single individual)
_____________________/
                   \
                    Human ancestor (single individual)
No, surely the branching involved entire breeding populations -- one band, or a few bands, of apes moving into a new territory far from the lands where other members of their species lived. As noted, at the branch point, both populations would have been apes of the same species; they wouldn't become different species until after the branch point, after geographical separation left them free to evolve in two different directions. Remember that, just as there was no "first French speaker" struggling to make himself understood in a nation of classical Latin speakers, so there was no "first human" or "first chimpanzee," but only a gradual change over many generations from the same ancestral species.***
Can you take it from there? What's the pathway? At this point, can the chimp ancestor still interbreed with either the common ancestor or with the human ancestor? It has to interbreed with something in order to produce more offspring after its own kind, so where does the partner come from?
Most evolutionists hold that most speciation events are "allopatric," meaning that they occur after the ancestral population has split into two groups that could interbreed if they met, but which no longer meet up. Afterwards, mutation, genetic drift, and selection to different environments gradually change the populations into different species. No particular mutation (unless you count polyploidy) is likely to produce a new species. A better (though still oversimplified) approach would be to think of a whole series of mutations, some beneficial, most neutral (but they still made us different from chimps), that each made the bearer a tiny bit more "human" (or, in the other lineage, a tiny bit more "chimp"). No single gene would have made its bearer much different from other members of his species, or unable to interbreed with them.

The scientist seems to have missed the point that "Zoe" had probably read my argument (with God knows how many intermediates) as implied in post 3 about Chromosome numbers: the whole point of her discussion was that there had to be a first individual with a different point of chromosome numbers from its parents and otherwise possible mating partners.

Though the okapi example and that of Przewalski's horse vs domestic horse interbreeding make the impossibility less heavy, it is at least a question of very rare occurrence and in mammals other than rodents polyploidy seems to have no rôle in augmenting chromosome numbers, and the fusions seem to have to have occurred very often if they are to account for all lessenings of chromosome numbers.

Of course I totally agree that single gene mutations do not as a rule interfere with interbreedability. There are lots of single genes where pa and ma were different, same applies to apples (anyone read the book Botany of Desire? It seems apples and men are species where you can count on sexually produced offspring being sensibly different from their origin and indeed unpredictable because of all chromosome differences and recombination possibilities): even in my late guinea pigs, a wavy haired white male, angora guinea pig, I think, a straight haired female golden aguti, a "curly" haired female called "Bianca Croce" with a white cross on darker colours (hence the name) produced varied and fertile offspring. But I am pretty sure they had the same chromosome numbers.

Hans Lundahl

Aix en Provence
Monday of Holy Week
8/21 April 2008

PS: Tried to notify the source of the second statement (the one here quoted), but his e-mail was outdated.

*and mice, sorry, another update will be due, here it is, along with evening primroses.

**Here is that quote:

polyploidy is duplication of the entire genome; plants speciate this way all the time, but it's rarer for animals (though there are strongly supported examples for frogs, rodents, and other vertebrates; presumably, they can't form a new species unless they can either reproduce parthenogenically, or unless polyploidy happens often enough that eventually it produces two members of the same species at the same time and place)

it is left unclear whether polyploid rodents would include only individuals or parthenogenic lines or any new species - note also that in polyploidy it is a question of all chromosomes, terefore same chromosomes doubled, whereas in doubling or halving of chromosomes other than doubling of all, the chance of two independently getting same modification is close to nil.

***But there was a first speaker for every change that differentiates Latin from French! There was a first speaker to drop the final nasalisation in "servum" (-um like -om in Portuguese bom) coming up with roughly servu (as in Sardinian/Corsican) or servo (as in Italian/Spanish), there was a first speaker to drop the vowel altogether (as in French/Occitan), and each first speaker had to make himself understood: and there was a first writer to decide not to write "ser(f)s, serf" as "servus, servum" but as "ser(f)s, serf", and he did it because he wanted it read and pronounced by people who did not have Francogallic Romance as a mother tongue when speaking on a certain occasion to people who did: the Occasion was the Oaths of Strasburg. The other side of the oath was written in passable phonetic approximation of Old High German, like Ripuarian Frankish or something. And passably phonetic approximations were again possible because Alcuin had come from York to teach the French to pronounce written "servus, servum" as, precisely "servus, servum" when speaking in Church. Other difference: we know people who spoke more or less Classic Latin gave rise to speakers of French, Occitan, Catalan, Castillian, Italian, Sardinian, Corsican: because we have the terminus a quo as well as the terminus ad quem (like the Gentle and magnanimous Frenchies that surround me here) under close observation by mainly themselves, including as writers, a capacity in which they sometimes survive their death. We know there was an Ausonius of Bourdeaux, to whom Classic Latin was essentially good grammar, and we know there was a Dante Alighieri of Florence to whom speaking Latin meant using the invention of speaking grammatically, an "invention" he describes in terms reminiscent of Esperanto - all the while using "si" "oc" and "oïl" to distinguish the languages he thinks of as real vernaculars (recognisable as Spanish/Italian, Provençal, French). And between them we know Alcuin and the oaths of Strassburg. Before Alcuin and after Ausonius we know that Gregory of Tours wrote bad Latin and Fredegar worse - as if they spoke Frenchily but wrote nearly Latin. After Alcuin we have the varied literary works in diverse Romance languages coming up, Song of Roland nearly two hundred years before Dante wrote Vita Nuova and Divina Commedia. We know all these individuals as we will never know Lucy - because either Lucy didn't write, or if she did her writing has not survived or if it did it is not put in relation to her sceleton. We know writers of old centuries as well as we know bloggers of foreign continents. At least as well as we know bloggers we have never written to or who have no possibility to write back. There are things we can never know about someone, because he is far away in place or time, because they are not directly there in the text, or because they have not been written down, but there are things we do know, because they have been written down. Lies cannot be totally excluded in all circumstances, but neither can those or other fakes in face-to-face intercourse. And what language someone writes when he writes himself is hard to fake. You may write a foreign language, but you may not write above your level in it, though you may sometimes improve it.

Speciation observed - but not in mammals

Talkorigins claims speciation has been observed ... in plants and invertabrates. Exactly not in mammals who are exactly the type of animals where polyploidy is excluded. One event includes a diploid variety having as many chromosomes as a tetraploid would have - but noone observed it becoming diploid. The botanist found the new species among his plants:

5.1.1.1 Evening Primrose (Oenothera gigas)
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.

If he found it, how can he be sure it was offspring of his previously studied plants? Because, you see, if the new chromosome number had been not 2n=28, but 4n=28, it would have been a very simple case of polyploidy. Here the question is: how did the 28 start out as 4*7 and end up as 2*14? Also, it is not specified (ha ha) if he could breed Oenothera gigas at all. There is of course cloning ...

As for diverse chromosome numbers (a k a karyotypes) in mice, they do not make different species, it seems. Do not ask me when and where Mus musculus domesticus with 2n=40 and such with 2n=22 have crossbred, but they count as same species, hence they have the same Latin name. A new chromosomal race of the house mouse, Mus musculus domesticus ...

A want-to-read: creationist Jack Cuozzo's book about Neanderthal man.

Non-replies

Emanuela Solano has not replied on question whether mice with different caryotypes have been observed to interbreed, which I sent her after reading link in "Speciation observed, but not in mammals". Ian Johnston has not replied to my argument immediately below the quote.

I have given both the opportunity to do so, by mailing them.

series and tinyurl to this one --- see comments Why is this a problem for evolution? Genes mutate. In each population, sometimes the mutation, sometimes the unmutated gene and sometimes both prevail. If a population splits in two, they will mutate into different ways. If enough genes are different, at last the populations will be genetically too different for mating to occur with offspring viable and fertile. They are two different species. This link is to an article - in fulltext - dealing with an experiment where speciations is seen as having been directly observed. Read their definitions carefully. "Even though behaviorally isolated species ..." "behaviorally isolated" - well that would make different human cultures count as different species too. SO WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? CHROMOSOMES Genes bunch in chromosomes, and chromosomes are counted in whole numbers. And the number of chromosomes is fairly fixed, and yet mammals have different numbers of chromosomes. In most species, mammal or not, chromosomes are diploid (Greek for twofold, meaning all of the chromosomes) in the cells making up a single body, haploid (Greek for simple, meaning in all of the chromosomes) in sex cells. Triploid (Greek for threefold, meaning in all of the chromosomes) individuals occur in plants, fish, lizards, birds, they are infertile or selffertilising females, both ways are roads out of sexual reproduction and therefore evolution as usually understood. Diploid chromosome setups mean that chromosomes go in pairs that hang together at the centromere and branch off to telomeres. Centromeres (middle pieces) and Telomeres (end pieces) are like full stops in genetic information. It is DNA bundled too tight for readability. But they are essential for the RNA-readings of the arms - an arm is whatever part of a chromosome is between one Centromere and one Telomere. Chromosomes have one centromere and two telomeres, except (if I recall correctly) Y-chromosomes that have only two telomeres, one of which counts as centromere because bundling with such of the X-chromosome.
Less chromosomes	More chromosomes
Normally for diploid beings:
Sex cells forming halve the number of chromosomes into only one for each pair.	Sex cells meeting and forming new individuals double the number of the sex cell chromosomes, getting back to normal.
Not Normally for diploid beings:
Haplosomy (onefold in one single pair) going on to asomy (none in that pair)? Asomy means total lack of one chromosome and means non-viability of embryon. So haplosomy is a non-way. Unless, which is not very likely, all the vital information of a chromosome had been transferred to chromosomes of another pair. In mankind, Y-chromosome haplosomy is not viable, but X-chromosome haplosomy gives infertile or less fertile women. But they are same pair, XX a normal woman, XY a normal man. Robertsonian chromosome fusion, is this how it works? Have I proven too much? Mice go in different chromosome numbers, and they seem to be yet one species. Okapi may have one or two chromosome pairs or even a pair and a half, for same parts of genome.	Chromosome fission - as complex as fusion (study diagrams and handwritten text on image left), plus where does the new centromere or the new telomeres come from? (P Z Myers claims new centromere comes from locus duplication - but that does not explain new telomere on the intra-centromere side of each split) Trisomy (three chromsomes in one single pair) - means handicap, sometimes to fertility (in sex chromosomes) sometimes to other chromosomes. But a trisomy, even if extended after a generation to tetrasomy, does not mean two pairs where there was one, only four chromosomes to a pair, and that is handicap. Polyploidy: triploidy see above. Tetraploid and octoploid individuals occur in amphibians and plants - that are typically greater or stronger or twice as complex as diploid samples. Mammals are neither amphibians nor plants. Even if they could be polyploid, which seems not to be the case, that would not open the way for new pairs forming. Each four chromosomes are the four chromosomes of a pair, not the two by two chromosomes of two pairs.
Theories should in principle be falsifiable. If evolution is a theory, chromosome numbers - as well as other similar creationist arguments - are not theories, but falsifications of this theory. I think chromosome numbers is such a difficulty (if not downright disproof) that that is why Scientists are very shy about putting on the web articles for free about this subject. On my comments to Non-replies I have been looking for such using a scholar google. Time after time I have only got to the abstract of an article that is readable for paying subscribers only. See list at end of comments.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
en dépt^nt13 ou 84
30 May/11 June AD 2009

PS, A list of different chromosome numbers from a creationist site:

The Evolution of Species by Means of Increasing Number of Chromosomes
-or-
The Preservation of Complex Life Forms in the Struggle for Life

-By Dr. Kent Hovind-

Number of Chromosomes:

Fern 480 The ultimate goal.

White Ash 138

Carp 100

Goldfish 94

Sweet Potato 90
Turkey 82

- Chicken 78
- Dog 78
- Duck 78 Identical Triplets!

Horse 64

Cow 60

Silkworm 56

Cotton 52

Amoeba 50

- Chimp 48
- Tobacco 48 Identical Twins!

Human 46

Bat 44

Wheat 42

Soybean 40

Cat 38

Starfish 36

Apple 34

- Alligator 32
- Onion 32 Identical Twins!

Frog 26

- Opossum 22
- Redwood 22
- Kidney Bean 22 Identical Triplets!

- Corn 20
- Marijuana 20
- Carrot 20 Identical Triplets!

Lettuce 18

Honeybee 16

Garden Pea 14

- House Fly 12
- Tomato 12 Identical Twins!

Fruit Fly 8

Penicillium 2

Source: DrDino/Kent Hovind - after reading which I searched in Talkorigins.org and got this. Which is where my argument comes from.

Credits to user Jon for giving me the opportunity to refind it.

comments part:

Hans Lundahl a dit…
"http://o-x.fr/292" = biologist P Z Myers saying this is no problem.He gives a diagram, but no medical or veterinarian cases where chromosome fission has happened before eyes of researchers. Fusion does happen: cancer, Downs, fertility problems. I DID look up Robertsonian fusion on a scholar google, as he said I should.What he considers sufficient evidence might be related or (to creationists simply) similar species, in which the corresponding parts (remember, there are non-corresponding parts as well) of total genomes are stocked on different numbers of chromosomes. Like his example on an earlier post, where two chimpanzee chromosomes are supposed to correspond to one fusioned human chromosome, because of corresponding genetic material on them.
13 juin 2009 07:45
Hans Lundahl a dit…
This is from a man Myers calls an "ignorant" creationist: Evidence for Fusion in a Human Chromosome Tells you LITTLE TO NOTHING about whether Humans Share a Common Ancestor with Living ApesUsually Darwinists argue for human-ape common ancestry based upon alleged "shared errors" in human DNA and ape DNA. But the chromosomal fusion evidence is not a “shared error” argument for human / ape common ancestry, because apes do not have a fused chromosome. The human chromosomal fusion argument focuses on a fusion event that is specific to the human line, and therefore provides a highly limited form of evidence for human / ape common ancestry.Ignorant of biology or not, he is at least knowledgeable in textual criticism establishing of manuscript history --- as well as logic. Whether there are common transcription errors had by both apes or men or no, the fusion of #2 (if indeed it was a fusion) is special to man. Whether this fusion adequately explains how men can have evolved from a common ape ancestor or not, it does not prove we actually did.
13 juin 2009 08:14
Hans Lundahl a dit…
That was from "http://o-x.fr/-53" --- And the Miller Told His Tale: Ken Miller's Cold (Chromosomal) Fusion (Updated)
13 juin 2009 08:16
Hans-Georg Lundahl a dit…
This is now accessible on http://o-x.fr/tcu
28 juillet 2009 12:26
Hans-Georg Lundahl a dit…
An extra check on chromosome numbers per species ...

Théologie et philosophie

2009-06-23T05:41:00.000-07:00

1 an answer to the question if thomism is opposed to evolution because specific forms are not accidental

2 an answer to a longer answer, after having already answered some turns, which unfortunately defending the compatibility of thomism and evolution a) sciences of physical causes b) newness of animals and plants c) six recent days d) a question of historical truth e) Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Maritain

New responses
a) Chromosomes b) submission to ecclesiastical authority c) Patristics d) infallible criterium

Third stage responses
a) St Cyprians authority is about ... what? b) the authority of St Justin the Philosopher c) Egyptian Patristics d) a summing up of your use of patristics so far e) further inconsistencies f) "It does not increase ones faith nor make one moral if they believe or disbelieve in evolution."

- want to read all of the debate? Look at source, immediate or original

1 an answer to the question if thomism is opposed to evolution because specific forms are not accidental

Materialism is opposed to thomism precisely in considering corporeal things as accidents of protons, neutrons and electrons in the combinations known as atoms and ions.Even without thomism - is it biologically possible for mammals with one chromosome number to evolve from ammals with a clearly different one?hints:

a) all mammal individuals are diploid, that is: chromosomes go in pairs

b) each chromosome belongs to its own set, which in mammals means: its own pair

c) three or one chromosomes in one pair are a malformation, not the beginning of one pair more or less

d) chromosomes are only counted in natural numbers, not in infinitesimal fractions anyway (yes, genes are infinitesimal fractions of chromosomes, and yes, the chromosomes do change genes, or so people who study presumed chromosome evolutions say; but the issue is the chromosomes, not the individual genes)
back to content

2 an answer to a longer answer, after having already answered some turns, which unfortunately defending the compatibility of thomism and evolution

R. H.,I am forced to answer briefly, and I have not much to say, but it is to the point(s).

a) physical causes, sciences thereof

Aquinas certainly acknowledged them. Would that mean he would have accepted evolutionism? Less sure. Evolution presupposes the knowledge of a physical timeline of billions of years. Aquinas helf that what is neither present and perfectly visible and tangible cannot be perfectly known. That includes distant things, that includes past and futre, that includes the hidden. It also includes a possibility, which in thomistic terms would involve a very antithomistic proposition, i e that the essences of the different kinds of plants and animals differ only accidentally and one could therefore evolve from the other by accident, just as red-haired and brown-haired men have accidentally evolved from the same Adam, maybe the same post-flood survivors. This possibility is as unmendelian as it is unthomistic. Mendel knew of recombinations and of qualities that followed suit and did not recombine. Later research has identified the numbers of phenotype recombinations with the chromosomes that define the numbers of genotype recombinations. A lemur, a rat, a dog and a man have quite different chromosome numbers. These are numbers of whole pairs. A pair is not constituted by its number of chromosomes [alone] (two in any mammal) but also by their functions, each chromosome of one pair having in common with the other a specific set of functions. Superfluous and lacking chromosomes in one pair come nowhere near constituting new pairs or reducing the number of pairs (except if two different chromosomes - i e from different pairs - are recombined around one "new" centromere [new as new to both, but old for one of them]: even that would happen only from one parent first time, and the individual would from the other parent inherit a set of chromosomes that has the old dsitribution), variation in chromosome numbers include malfunctions, some of them lethal, some inhibit fertility, some simply make the new individual abnormal....
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b) newness of animals and plants:

"Species, also, that are new, if any such appear, existed beforehand in various active powers; so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning. Again, animals of new kinds arise occasionally from the connection of individuals belonging to different species, as the mule is the offspring of an ass and a mare; but even these existed previously in their causes, in the works of the six days."

One by one, now:

"so that animals, and perhaps even new species of animals, are produced by putrefaction by the power which the stars and elements received at the beginning."

Spontaneous generation of animals (like flies and toads) has since that time been rejected. It is as unscientific today as it was unbiblical then. "omne vivum ex ovo."*

"Again, animals of new kinds arise occasionally from the connection of individuals belonging to different species, as the mule is the offspring of an ass and a mare; but even these existed previously in their causes, in the works of the six days."

And mules are infertile. There can therefore never be a population of mules, only a collection of them.

St Augustine gives another example: thorny bushes, toads, flies, et c appeared after the fall as fullgrown individuals, punishing Adam, God having only created them "in ovo" or embryonically before the fall.

*I am not saying strictest sticking to Bible's words be necessary to orthodoxy: I am merely observing that when that old teacher accepted compromising with them to accomodate what was then science, he has not been confirmed by more recent science - like the chrystalline spheres of the heavens, which St Basil explains why Moses didn't mention, though the scientists back then had apparently proven their existance: these scientists back then have not been confirmed by more recent astronomers.
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c) six recent days

Some few Church Fathers - Origen, therein defended by St Augustine - said God created all in one single instant (at least embryonically, some species growing to fullgrown individuals only later) and the six days are six mental "dawnings" of the different aspects of that one instant work on the angels observing it. Most say the six days were six days. Thomas say both may be true, the one instant observed in six mental dawnings on angelic knowledge referring to embryonic individuals, the six real days referring to full grown individuals.

I know no Church Father of the First Millennium to have suggested the six days might be what Pius XII in Humani Generis considered possible: six much longer periods.

That discrepancy was once one of my motives for rejecting the papacy of that man, while still accepting papacy as such.
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d) a question of historical truth

apart from the question of scientific truth - which leaves the question totally open as to time frame, closed as against kind to kind evolution - apart from the questions of secondary causes which is accepted* whatever you may believe on age dating and macroevolution, apart from the question whether the solution offered by Humani Generis is orthodox or not, there remains a question of HISTORICAL truth

heathen traditions from most places all over the world confirm the details rejected in the name of "scientific progress": a fairly recent creation, a degeneration of men thereafter, a flood, and a repopulation of mankind

*that God sometimes acts through such causes, not that he were bound to exclusively do so
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e) Teilhard de Chardin and Jacques Maritain

They seem to think that science as known now is the same in base as science as known back then, only the research is better. That is where I think they got it wrong.

Some of the new methods are rather methods of qualified guessing than of real deduction, real observation. They are methods which Aquinas and Aristotle would have rejected as unscientific. The old, less than scientific statements (chrystalline spheres, spontaneous generation) were so by lack of possibility of observations correcting them. They made the best of available evidence. The new ones are unscientific by making the best of evidence that is so clearly off topic.

Unfortunately this post was the only response that kept my promise of briefness. Until I just lengthened it.
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New responses:

a) Chromosomes:

"You discussion on chromosomes assumes that any new variation that results in something of a new species would have to be abnormal in the sense of somehow being defective. This is a huge assumption. The truth is that mutation leads to evolution because genes are crossed over in the process from one chromosome to the other."

I am not assuming it. I am concluding it, for those changes which involve changes of chromosome numbers, from what I know as a fact about changes of chromosome numbers from normal in men.
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b) submission to ecclesiastic authority*:

"Must be convenient to just reject the insights** from encyclicals as you see fit."

I did not reject his encyclicals and his bull before coming to believe believe that he was a heretical non-pope or anti-pope, nor afterwards, but at the same time.

*Which is neither a philosophical, nor a patristic argument
**according to how Pio Nono defined papacy, the Holy Spirit was not given so that Popes might expound new doctrines revealed by Him, but ....
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c) Patristics:

"What about St. Cyprian of Carthage:
"'As the first seven days in the divine arrangement containing seven thousand of years, as the seven spirits and seven angels which stand and go in and out before the face of God, and the seven-branched lamp in the tabernacle of witness, and the seven golden candlesticks in the Apocalypse, and the seven columns in Solomon upon which Wisdom built her house l so here also the number seven of the brethren, embracing, in the quantity of their number, the seven churches, as likewise in the first book of Kings we read that the barren hath borne seven'"

Likely to refer to the seven thousand years of human history (including the eighth millennium anno creationis which just started some 200 years ago or more) rather than to timelength of creation week as such. Certainly such a reference is there in De Civitate Dei by St Augustine. Have you really checked the context of the quote, or have you just taken on faith that it be applicable to creation week as such?

"And it was a popular notion among the some of the Early Church Fathers to quote the psalm referring to a day as a thousand years to the lord in reference to Adam in the garden as St. Justin Martyr does."

Now here I would have liked a quote!

"Now if we are talking about a six thousand year creation as believed by at least one Church Father, maybe more, this seems to directly contradict your earlier notion that all Early Church Fathers believed in a short creation."

Which one? St Justin Martyr or St Cyprian of Carthage? The quote not given or the quote that may be taken out of context?
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d) infallible criterium:

"Now maybe you have some infallible ability to determine whether encyclical letters or unorthodox but until the Church condemns it I prefer to entertain the possibility."

Vincent of Lerins? Commonitorium? I will not condemn a man as heretic for believing evolution till a general council condemn it, but I will not hold that it is an orthodox interpretation of Genesis or that it does not at least imply grave heresies about God as creator and as good - implications that the individual Christian believer who accepts evolution need of course not be aware of in some cases, but which cannot be absent in all cases either.
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Third stage responses:

a) St Cyprians authority is about ... what?

a more extensive quote from treatises 11:11 - here:

"What, indeed, do we find in the Maccabees of seven brethren, equals alike in their lot of birth and virtues, filling up the number seven in the sacrament of a perfected completion? Seven brethren were thus associating in martyrdom. As the first seven days in the divine arrangement containing seven thousand of years,(9) as the seven spirits and seven angels which stand and go in and out before the face of God, and the seven-branched lamp in the tabernacle of witness, and the seven golden candlesticks in the Apocalypse, and the seven columns in Solomon upon which Wisdom built her house( l) so here also the number seven of the brethren, embracing, in the quantity of their number, the seven churches, as likewise in the first book of Kings we read that the barren has borne seven." (unfortunately recurrent footnotes 9 and 1 were neither clickable nor otherwise identifiable on page)

Cyprian is indulging in numerology of a type little used nowadays. As well as in allegoric application. Saying that the seven days (of creation week) contain seven thousand years (of created history after creation and fall) is not tantamount in any way whatsoever to saying that the seven days were really not seven days in the ordinary sense, but seven thousand years. You got him wrong. Familiarise yourself with allegorical method and with numerology before you try to use this as an alternative timeline for creation week. Oh, and: the title of the treatise is not "Hexaëmeron" or "Work of six days" it is "Exhortation to Martyrdom, Addressed to Fortunatus." and chapter 11 is entitled: "11. That it was before predicted that the world would hold us in abhorrence, and that it would stir up persecutions against us, and that no new thing is happening to the Christians, since from the beginning of the world the good have suffered, and the righteous have been oppressed and slain by the unrighteous"

From the beginning of the world. Not at the beginning of the world. Sorry; if you are not intellectually dishonest on your own behalf in citing this as an alternative timeline for creation week as such, at least you are authority-thumping on behalf of someone intellectually dishonest, someone groping for straws to find patristic support for longer timelines. You may of course say that the chapter headings were added by some editor: indeed they were, but they are appropriate. The heading "work of the six days" would have been heavily inappropriate to the chapter as to the treatise as a whole.

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b) authority of St Justin the Philosopher

I reproduce your quote in full, just adding some little at the end:

With the Lord “one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4).
Furthermore light was created on day one but the sun not until day for.
Adam was told he would die on the same day that he ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil but he lived to be 930 years old. He died within 1000 years which seems to indicate that the days being referred to might be a thousand years each.

You asked about the quote from St. Justin Martyr quoting the psalm referring to a day as a thousand years to the lord in reference to Adam in the garden.

"For as Adam was told that in the day he ate of the tree he would die, we know that he did not complete a thousand years [Gen. 5:5]. We have perceived, moreover, that the expression ‘The day of the Lord is a thousand years’ [Ps. 90:4] is connected with this subject" (Dialogue with Trypho the Jew 81 [A.D. 155]).

There you go. And if that isn’t enough to satisfy you skepticism that Church Fathers believed different things about the time frame of the creation narrative I’ll do you a favor of providing a few more quotes to think about. This one is from Irenaeus in agreement with St. Justin Martyr:

"And there are some, again, who relegate the death of Adam to the thousandth year; for since ‘a day of the Lord is a thousand years,’ he did not overstep the thousand years, but died within them, thus bearing out the sentence of his sin" (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5:23:2 [A.D. 189]).

Indeed so. Only, the day when Adam ate the fruit and died, being indeed a thousand years old, happened after the seventh day on which God rested, thus after the days of Creation Week. Hence, St Justin is no authority for reading six thousand years into creation week.
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c) Egyptian patristics

What about the possibility of St. Clement of Alexandria speaking of “an indefinite and dateless production”?

"And how could creation take place in time, seeing time was born along with things which exist? . . . That, then, we may be taught that the world was originated and not suppose that God made it in time, prophecy adds: ‘This is the book of the generation, also of the things in them, when they were created in the day that God made heaven and earth’ [Gen. 2:4]. For the expression ‘when they were created’ intimates an indefinite and dateless production. But the expression ‘in the day that God made them,’ that is, in and by which God made ‘all things,’ and ‘without which not even one thing was made,’ points out the activity exerted by the Son"(Miscellanies 6:16 [A.D. 208]).

And here is Origin arguing against taking the six days literally as six twenty-four hour days: "For who that has understanding will suppose that the first and second and third day existed without a sun and moon and stars and that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? . . . I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance and not literally" (The Fundamental Doctrines 4:1:16 [A.D. 225]).

St Clement of Alexandria talks about the dateless and indefinite production. The context seems to indicate that the first production of things could not be dated in relation to previous events. It is no breach in the consensus that the six days were no longer than six ordinary days.

Origen is remarked about twice by St Augustine: once for the ingenuity of supposing God made all things in one single instant (i e much shorter than six days, absolutely no longer), which means that St Augustine having presumably read all Origen had to say about it concluded that he had opted for a one-instant creation. Which, unlike a seven thousand year or seven billion year creation is not at variance with patristic consensus of first millennium.

The second thing is that he remarked Origen for believing only the allegorical sense of Old Testament passages like the flood, the Antiochenes for believing only the literal sense of passages like the flood, but St Augustine held that a Catholic should believe both: both that those eight people were actually rescued by the arc, all without perishing (literal sense), and that all who are saved are so by the Church, all without perishing (allegorical sense).
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d) a sum up of your use of patristics (as seen so far in this debate)

After a scrutiny of you for patristic examples for a longer timespan of creation week than a week, I conclude that it holds not.

I never claimed patristic consensus is for the six days only, I said it is for either that or a one instant creation. The authority of Origen - which is not the authority of a canonised saint! - along with that of St Augustine - which is - go for the one instant creation. St Clement is unclear. Both other examples are such of allegory and prophecy about happenings after creation and fall, not of exposition of creation week as such.
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e) further inconsistencies

"I am not trying to read evolution into the Genesis account. I consider evolution a theory of science. As I said before I don’t dogmatically hold onto the theory of evolution. If new data and a new scientific theory came out that best dealt with this evidence, I imagine I would adopt it."

The Genesis account, taken literally, is an account of the beginnings of things visible, including all the animal species. So is Evolution. Labelling the one science and the other spirituality does not change that both taken literally are accounts of among other things, the beginnings of animal species. Now: the beginnings of all the animal species cannot be another thing or have another timeline than the beginnings of all animal species.

You are also pretending to bow down in science only to data and to coherent explanation.

I have already told you that evolution of a species with one number of chromosome pairs into a species with another number of chromosome pairs is a major difficulty. These data are not new, but they may be so to you. You interpreted me as presuming rather than concluding (from humdrum medical data about chromosome syndroms, Downs, Klinefeldt's, et c) that this would involve an evolution passing in each and every such case by at least one - actually more than one generation of - chromosomatically abnormal individuals. Survival of the unfittest, so to speak. If you want to pretend at some honesty in science (I am not talking theology now) read up on chromosomes.

What may also be news to you, though absolutely not to a creationist - yes, I am absolutely still talking about science, not theology here - is that age dating presupposes relying on data we actually do not have: like, for C14, did the atmosphere back when these bones (say the ones in Atapuerca) were alive contain approximately the same percentage of C14 - it has been measureed for a much shorter time - or, for geological dating, are Jura and Trias really remnants from different periods, rather than remnants of different collections of species wrongly classed as period faunas.

And here I remark that Aquinas (my Church does not recognise his canonisation, though I personally find him a holy man, not far from St Photius the Great in character and cultural type, though less learned, perhaps, in classics, and more learned, perhaps, in Aristotle) did not recognise as science the "knowledge" of something past/future/faraway/hidden and at same time contingent.

If something is contingent, it can be known only if visibly and tangibly at hand. Secondary to that is the memory of such knowledge in the individual who had it, tertiary to that knowledge is the transmission of such memory, by spoken or written word, enforced perhaps by pictoiral or other non-verbal means. It is not classed as science, it is individual knowledge of an individual thing or occurrence.If something is known without having to be physically at hand, it is that insofar as the knowledge is typical, not individual: and therefore necessary, not contingent. Past things are not necessary. Eternal (or quasieternal, i e uninterrupted since creation) past-present-and-future things are.

Clearly - and I am speaking as a scientific disciple of the Aquinate, not as a theological one - the claim that birds descend from ornithopod reptiles, who along with sauropod reptiles descend from batrachians, is not an example of eternal, necessary truth: we do not find the frogs or salamanders hatching eggs that become alternatively velociraptors or geckos, neither do we find regularly that velociraptors hatch eggs that become archaeopteryges, or that those hatch eggs that become birds as we know them. Rather, we find neither velociraptors or archaeopteryges around (or if, they have not been identified as such): we find geckos hatching geckos, we find salamanders hatching salamanders, we find birds hatching birds of their own kinds, with the possible - it is viennese history from a time that modern zoologists regard as unreliable, a k a legend - the basilisk, hatched by a cock.back to content

f) "It does not increase ones faith nor make one moral if they believe or disbelieve in evolution."

If you contend yourself with believing evolution, without concluding anything from it, adversely to traditional exegetics ... to traditional view of species as fixed (Teilhard notably believed mankind was evolving to "point Omega") ... to traditional eschatology ... and traditional views of the innocence of all visible creation before Adam's fall; if overmore you ask no questions about the implications in theory of knowledge by accepting evolution as scientific, if you do not accept other similar non-scientific but nowadays academic methods - notably psychology and psychiatry that deal heavy-handedly with what is hidden in the heart of the human neighbour, notably demographic ecological and other futurologic expertise; in short, if you accept evolution with a childish faith without asking questions, without concluding, I think it may be perfectly anodine. But such a limited faith in evolution is, at least in adults, above a certain level of instruction, rare; or otherwise my experience in discussing evolution misleads me.

When you argue with atheists, they know perfectly well that your belief in evolution as a fact, or your limited belief in the closely literal sense of Genesis, is a novum in the Christian Church. They will three out of four times say to themselves or between themselves that you are right about the beginning of all animal species, but that the people you accept as religious authorities were wrong. When you argue without arguing against evolution on the scientific level, when you indeed encourage their belief in modern scientific methods.

Hans
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